
# Panic

K.R. Griffiths

Copyright © K.R. Griffiths 2013

All rights reserved

# Also by K.R. Griffiths:

Wildfire Chronicles series:

Shock (Vol. 2)

Psychosis (Vol. 3)

Mutation (Vol. 4)

Trauma (Vol. 5)

Reaction (Vol. 6)

Coming soon:

Adrift

Connect with the author:

Facebook

Twitter

www.krgriffiths.org

This one's for everyone who helped.

Thanks doesn't seem like enough. 

# Prologue

From a distance, even the most violent events in nature can seem innocuous and easily overlooked. Thousands of feet above the Earth, viewed from tiny cabin windows, even the mightiest river – all that tumultuous and chaotic force – becomes just another blue scratch on the land below. The collapse of a star, an explosion a billion miles wide, wreaking havoc on an entire galaxy, becomes just a pin prick of light in the night sky.

Had a casual observer been scanning that same night sky on the morning it began the falling object would most likely have been overlooked. From a distance, the tiny object made its way serenely and gracefully toward the Earth kilometres below. It was canister-shaped, metallic. Sunlight that had yet to find its way to the surface of the planet glinted off it. It looked like a shooting star moving at its own leisurely pace.

Up close, of course, it was a different story. The canister thrummed and glowed as it forced penetration of the ionosphere, the sudden friction of the descent causing a buildup of energy that poured off it as writhing fire. Far above the clouds that blotted out the dark land below, the canister trembled like a living creature as the wind buffeted it, shrieking around its terminal velocity as though enraged at the intrusion. Up close, the descent was a thing of howling, relentless violence.

The night side of the Earth loomed below, curved at first, gradually flattening out as the canister approached, filling the horizon in all directions.

The canister-shaped object was not self aware. There was no moment of self congratulation as it headed straight for the target, the journey from space to ground unwavering. Perhaps even if the canister had a mind it would have realised that there was nothing particularly impressive about its precise journey. Nothing unique.

For in the distance, invisible at this range, other canisters were falling.

*

Jane Leary, normally an impressively heavy sleeper, woke with a start, blinking blearily into the darkness of the bedroom. Jane was an early riser, an unashamed member of the best part of the day brigade, but in fifty five years of practice, she had not come close to getting used to her alarm waking her. The alarm clock was an intruder in the bedroom, a malevolent presence that tortured her each and every morning, each press of the snooze button merely a delay to its inevitable victory. Jane always fought for those few precious minutes in the bed, which was somehow many times more warm and comfortable than when she had slipped into it the night before. Waking up before the alarm just wasn't on.

Leaning to her right, she squinted at her digital nemesis, feeling dismayed as the luminescent digits swam into focus.

4.37am. One hour and twenty three precious minutes before she was due to resume her daily battle with the alarm.

Jane frowned, irritated. She had learned long ago to have her last cup of tea in the evening no later than 10pm to avoid precisely these moments, yet even as she began to pull the covers aside she realised it was not her bladder that had awakened her. She paused. What then?

When she turned over, she discovered one possible culprit. Her husband's side of the bed was empty. She frowned again. Peter was resolutely not a morning person, refusing even to set an alarm clock. Instead he relied on Jane to wake him at the last possible moment, giving him just enough time to rush to the shower, hastily chew on some cold toast, and rush out to the Cathedral.

When they were a little younger Jane had tried to break him of this habit, going as far as to question why it was that a man of God would be content to miss the small miracle that occurred each morning, as light crept over the horizon and the world began to wake up. Peter's defence had been rock solid: "God," he said, "got his work done and spent a full day in bed."

She let her head drop back onto the pillow. Peter, having never mastered the don't-drink-before-bed thing, had probably woken up to use the loo, waking her in the process. He was a big man, and despite his best efforts, his movement made an impact. Jane closed her eyes, hoping that the brief, unwanted trip into wakefulness hadn't quite alerted her senses, but she already knew it was futile. Her morning routine was off-kilter, and her mind had decided to wake itself up fully by way of protest.

Well, she thought, might as well get the day started.

She flicked the off switch on the alarm clock, postponing the battle until tomorrow, and slid her feet out from under the covers into the cold air, relaxing when they found the soft material of her slippers, waiting at the side of the bed. Stepping into them, Jane stood, wrapping her cold dressing gown around her, and padded out of the bedroom.

She expected to find the door at the end of the hall - the entrance to the bathroom - shut, with a thin sliver of light escaping around its edges. That was where Peter would be. In thirty years of marriage, she hadn't known him to be anywhere else in the middle of the night, unless he was sick, in which case he would wrap himself in a duvet and relocate to the couch, aware that his coughing would disturb his wife's sleep.

The hallway was dark and empty.

Jane padded to the top of the stairs and peered down them. The ground floor appeared unlit – if Peter had been struck by some illness, it must be a bad one, to have him sitting down there in the dark.

"Pete?" She called out softly. "You okay hun?"

No response.

Suddenly Jane felt strangely apprehensive and off-balance. The stairs leading down into the darkness, stairs that she had walked for thirty years and more, which were as familiar to her as sunlight, now seemed oddly threatening and alien. A dark, strange landscape, as though the house was informing her that things were different in the small hours; that she should not be here.

Jane was no fan of horror films. Like Peter, she was mystified as to what enjoyment anyone could possibly get out of fear and violence. Why would anyone willingly spend time revelling in the darker, evil side of humanity? Still, she had caught the end of one on TV once and found herself reeled in; a clammy, breathless hour spent in the company of a young family living with some fearful malevolent spirit in their house. The experience had shaken Jane, and for a while it had kept resurfacing whenever she found herself alone in the house, particularly at night. The silence, the emptiness was suddenly a breeding ground for something, alive with dark potential, and around each corner she expected to find some sign of a presence, all the more horrifying for being couched in the friendly familiarity of her little home.

The feeling had worn off of course; she had never seen any such thing, and eventually the memory of the movie had been worn away by time, but an echo of that feeling always remained, a faint feeling that the safety of the home could so easily be twisted by some unpleasant surprise.

She felt it now. Why wasn't Peter answering?

The stairway lightswitch was at the bottom of the steps: a fact that had always been faintly irritating, but which now engulfed her in unchristian rage. She'd have to descend in the darkness. Setting her mouth in a firm line, reminding herself that movies weren't real, Jane began to descend, heart beating fast.

At the bottom of the stairs stood the front door, which neither Peter nor Jane ever really used, preferring the patio doors in the kitchen to the rear of the house. To the right, hidden behind a corner, was the entrance to the living room. With each step that she crept down, Jane kept her gaze focused more and more intently on this corner, half-expecting some dark shadow to move around it, a patch of blackness in the blackness, moving toward her almost invisibly. She tried not to think about the possibility that someone was waiting around that corner, grinning, seeing their prey clearly framed by light from above, stepping toward them.

The feeling that something was wrong increased as Jane reached the last couple of steps, and it took her a moment to realise what was causing it.

The draught. Jane could feel a cool breeze swirling around her bare calves. The back door was open. She swallowed painfully.

As soon as she was able, still two steps away from the floor, Jane reached out into the darkness and found the lightswitch, flicking it on and almost crying out with relief when she saw the menacing shadows flee. There was no evil presence lurking at the bottom of the stairs.

Turning the corner, she was able to see into the living room. Dark and empty.

No, not dark. Not quite. There was light spilling into the living room, a cold, lifeless light. Coming from the kitchen, no, through the kitchen. Coming from the back garden.

What on Earth?

Jane stepped cautiously through the living room, shivering as the cold night air flooding into the house chilled her, and onto the freezing tiles of the kitchen floor. The patio door was drawn fully back, revealing a sight that made her breath catch in her throat.

At the far end of the long, narrow garden, was a brilliant sphere of white light, roughly the height of a tall man. The light was painful to look at, yet somehow compelling, beautiful. Jane stepped forward, through the patio door and onto the small step beyond. There was something between her and the light, a silhouette that was difficult to make out at first.

As Jane squinted, trying to make it out, the light began to ebb, seeming to retract into itself, and the shape became familiar. Peter, her husband, kneeling on the ground, his hands placed on something within the light, something cylindrical and metallic.

"Pete?" Jane whispered softly.

At the sound of her voice, she saw her husband rise to his feet, turning, and begin to move toward her.

With the light dying away behind him, it was difficult to see until he was close. Only when he was a few feet away could Jane really see his face, see the eyes bulging in their sockets, blood seeping from the tear ducts. He was closer still when Jane understood that the man she had loved for over three decades, the gentle, kind man who had treated her like a queen intended to murder her.

So close that when he leapt toward her, snarling, strong fingers grasping for her neck, Jane didn't even have time to flinch.

*

The canister, half buried in the earth, cooled in the night air as the last of its power was expended. The payload delivered, the object had no more use. Its final act was the release of a drum of acid that it kept in its belly. It was a quiet sort of suicide.

# Chapter 1

Craig Haycock's head exploded in the extravagantly-named Bay restaurant and grill. It was a controlled demolition, no sign of damage externally. Inside though, the devastation was catastrophic.

The detonator, a dropped dish – now a constellation of once-white shards on a murky tile floor that owner Ralf Williams always cheerfully deemed "the colour of life, that is" – rattled and skittered to a halt. The sharp noise set Craig's tender nerves jangling.

He moaned dramatically. Mainly for effect, given that even this bare minimum of effort was seized on by his pounding head as a sign that, clearly, it needed to step up its efforts to subdue and punish him.

"God's sake Ralf, keep it down will you? I'm dying here."

Ralf, red-faced and sweating profusely, nodded a breathless apology at his only customer, and frowned as he set to the task of plotting the course he would need to take to navigate around his plentiful gut and down to the floor to clean up the mess.

Cradling his coffee, Craig felt uncannily like he had just kicked a sick puppy, and let out a guilty sigh. He made a mental note to leave Ralf a healthy tip. Neither his own raging hangover nor the smashed plate was particularly Ralf's fault, though the latter had a case that would definitely stand up in court. The fat man's clumsiness was innate, and endearing in all honesty. Ralf liked to joke that he'd be a Michelin-starred chef if only he could get the food from the oven to the table in one piece. His regular customers, fully aware that the place was little more than a greasy spoon dressed up in its Sunday best naturally retorted that he had more chance of becoming the Michelin-man.

Craig gulped down a mouthful of near-scalding coffee and felt the caffeine begin to work its magic on his protesting body. He took a moment to silently curse the strange bond that forms when two people are alone in one space, and slid off the rickety barstool to help clear the shards of porcelain.

"Take it easy, mate," he said to Ralf with a watery grin, as he positioned himself between the gelatinous blur of activity and the remainder of the smashed plate. "I'll sort it out. Don't want you getting a heart attack before that bacon's ready."

Craig plucked the dustpan and brush from Ralf's meaty left hand, and staggered a little when the big man gave him a grateful slap on the shoulder. Ralf waddled back to the griddle.

Craig had ordered bacon with the coffee, and the aroma was beginning to fill the room, which could seat up to thirty diners, but which usually only seated about five. The grill was located on the road that led from St. Davids to the picturesque White Sands Bay beach, roughly halfway between the two. As such it was mainly a base of operations for the town's small but enthusiastic fishing community, and not much else. Occasionally travellers stopped in, making their way along to coastal road to nearby Fishguard, which boasted a sizeable ferry port and numerous boats making the short trip across the water to Ireland. Drawn in (and some may argue deceived) by the Bar and grill tag and the promise of a fine meal overlooking the crashing waves of the Irish Channel.

The view was guaranteed, but the café, as the locals obstinately continued to call it, was hardly a fine dining experience. Not that Craig's rumbling, gurgling stomach would agree, as the smell of the salty bacon filled his nostrils and made his mouth water. All depends on your definition of 'fine', he thought, as he began to sweep up the broken plate. Few things, in Craig's opinion, were finer than a good bacon butty when you'd spent the best part of a night sat on a tiny trawler in savage, freezing winds, only to return home with a handful of worthwhile cod and a half empty bottle of scotch.

"Good catch last night mate?" Ralf puffed cheerfully, apparently reading Craig's mind.

Craig looked up. Ralf was still chasing bacon around the griddle. He could have simply left it to cook of course, but Craig knew that Ralf liked to tend to food as it cooked, whether it was required or not. Made him feel like a chef.

Had it been anyone else enquiring, Craig would have suspected sarcasm. The whole town knew that these days his nights were spent plumbing the depths of a bottle, not the freezing sea. It had been that way since Amy died. Nearly three years, now. Shit.

Craig forced a sickly chuckle, and returned his gaze to the last of the mess on the floor.

"Sea's drying up Ralf. My whole catch last night could have just about served us up a decent breakfast, if I trusted you to cook it right."

Behind Craig, the door to the café opened and a blast of the icy Welsh coastal wind rushed in, undoing all the hard work Ralf's tiny space heater had put in that morning in a couple of seconds.

Ralf didn't respond, and Craig felt a little pang of guilt again. Surely the big man knew he was kidding? He shot a glance at Ralf. The fat man, uncharacteristically, was rooted to the spot, eyes fixed on the doorway.

Something about the stony expression on Ralf's face, normally so convivial, iced up Craig's veins. Maybe it was some relic of his days as a proper fisherman, some finely tuned animal instinct bred of a life spent doing battle with the sea, Craig would never know, but even before he turned to face the doorway, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling in silent warning, Craig realised that he was in the presence of death.

When finally he faced the doorway, all of Craig's instincts deserted him, swept away on a tidal wave of incomprehension.

Standing in the doorway to the Bay restaurant and grill, framed by gunmetal skies and shrieking wind, was Father Peter Leary. Thirty years a St. Davids resident. The man who baptised and married and buried the people. A man of steely faith and gentle humour.

From his left hand, hair entwined around tightly clutched fingers, hung a severed human head.

*

St. Davids, a tiny collection of centuries-old dwellings on the south western tip of Wales, had enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past couple of decades as surfers and second-homers from the home counties descended on the town, drawn towards the rolling waves and low prices. The main street, once home to numerous local craft shops, subsequently became home to a procession of wine bars and would-be fancy restaurants that were forced to close for half the year when much of the population returned to the cities, but the overall feeling of the place remained undiminished.

The influx of seasonal new blood had done little to change the overall demographic. In the main the residents of St. Davids were either in the middle of their twilight years, or at the very least, seriously considering turning on their headlights.

It wasn't that work was hard to come by exactly, but there was little to entice young working families to the area. A thirty minute commute by car brought the nearby town of Haverfordwest onto the radar, but, not exactly living down the rural moniker itself, the larger town offered little in the way of employment for those concerned with getting the latest Audi or buying a 50" Plasma screen TV. The net result of which was that there were very few young people in St. Davids, fewer children, and those who did attend the tiny local school spent most of their time eagerly counting down the days until they finally reached an age at which they could leave.

All of which meant there was very little crime in St. Davids, which suited Michael Evans, one of the town's two-strong (or, as local wags would opine too-strong) full time police force, very well indeed.

On this particular cold, grey morning, Michael was sitting as usual in one of the town's two 'squad cars', outside his colleague Carl Wilkins' house, waiting for the older man to appear for his ride to work. The engine was running, the heater working overtime to keep the freezing air at bay. Carl, as usual, was late.

Strictly following protocol, of course, Michael and Carl were each meant to pilot a squad car around the streets, but this seemed unnecessarily wasteful and, in any case, no one from further up the chain of Police command had yet bothered to venture this far into the sticks to check whether their guidelines and advisories were actually being implemented.

Michael shivered and pushed the heater up to maximum. He hated mornings. Hated the way that each dawn broke the promise of the night before, that tomorrow things might be different. After two years, he still could not adjust to waking up to an empty house, and heavy, unwelcoming silence. Michael's morning routine was always a carefully planned rush, a race against time to get to work that left no room for sitting in that silence, for introspection. Carl's steadfast refusal to exit his house on time was ruining that.

Michael reached for his phone, intending to fill a minute or so by checking for messages that he knew were not waiting for him, when Carl opened the door and flopped into the car with a dramatic "Brrrrrr." Michael flicked the phone shut, slipping it back into a pocket.

"Coffee and doughnuts, partner," Carl said, in a mock Southern-USA drawl that hadn't improved with repetition. Michael forced a grin, and reached for the thermos Carl offered. With their work consisting mainly of giving lifts to drunks and resolving occasional half-hearted disputes between neighbours, Carl had, several months back, begun to narrate their days like a voice-over on some hard-boiled detective movie. It had started as an ironic joke, yet now it was routine, but at least it came with fresh coffee and yesterday's fresh doughnuts each morning. After all, cops are meant to eat doughnuts.

Michael poured himself a steaming coffee into a small plastic cup, and took a long gulp.

"How'd it go then mate?"

Carl grunted by way of response. It was virtually his primary mode of communication. Carl had a grunt for every scenario, probably including a couple Michael didn't like to think about. This one? Displeasure with a hint of resignation.

"She's still...adamant."

The faux-accent was gone, replaced by a gruff, well seasoned valley-boy lilt.

Michael arched an eyebrow. Carl was not noted for his concise vocabulary. The argument must have been a real doozy.

Carl bit into a doughnut and chewed slowly, grimacing, as though the burst of sugar brought him no pleasure whatsoever. He chewed, as always, like a cow.

Michael tried to pin down his partner's expression. Thoughtful. Or constipated. Michael plumped for the former, despite his all-too detailed knowledge of Carl's diet.

"Wants to be nearer the kids." The big man said finally, with an audible swallow. "Told her spending twenty one years in the same house as them was surely enough."

Michael snorted a laugh.

"Then she says maybe spending thirty years with me was more than enough."

Michael chuckled again. Carl's wife, Beth, was a real firecracker. He'd hung out at the Wilkins place often, and rarely left without his ears ringing, usually having been informed by Beth that if he wanted to sort out his life, Michael would have to cheer the hell up, since no one wanted to be with a 'misery-guts'.

Beth was forthright, but she was also usually just plain right. It was a killer combination.

"Then she brings out the big guns. Grandchildren. We'll have 'em soon enough. She wants to be able to see 'em. End of."

Carl often spoke like this, in bullet points. Michael had long suspected his friend had evolved this mannerism precisely because he was married to Beth. He could only ever get words in edgeways. Had to make them count.

"Ouch," Michael said sympathetically. "No big guns of your own?"

"Water pistols, mate." Carl shook his head, forlorn. "She wants me to put in a transfer request to Cardiff. Maybe even Bristol. What the hell would a proper police force want with the likes of me? Can't be that many kittens need rescuing from trees."

Michael's face cracked in a grin. "True," he said, nodding sombrely. "But on the other hand, kettles don't boil themselves. And there's always filing, and-"

"Bastard," Carl said with a laugh. "Just talked yourself out of a doughnut."

Michael laughed.

"So what are you gonna do, mate? Doesn't sound like Beth's going to budge on this one, eh?"

Carl shook his head wearily. "When does she ever? I dunno mate. Women."

He tutted.

"Better off without them."

Carl caught Michael's gaze, and suddenly his face dropped. He flushed.

"Shit, mate, I-"

Michael put the car in gear, and felt rising dismay at the sudden awkwardness, but having no idea how to defuse it, adopted his default approach: pretend he hadn't heard. He cleared his throat.

"Right then, first order of business?" Michael kept his eyes focused on the road.

"Hell," said Carl. "Let's swing out by Ralf's. Beth's got this idea that muesli constitutes a proper breakfast. My stomach says otherwise."

Michael pulled the car away from the kerb, and set off into the unremarkable grey morning.

*

The smell of blood mingled with the salty aroma of bacon, filling the small bar area, hanging in the air like a harsh rebuke.

For Craig Haycock, time seemed to stand still. Heavy and thick, the atmosphere tingled with shock and violence. It felt like the moments before an electrical storm erupted.

His mouth dropped open, his eyes painfully wide, as though his brain had requested more visual information than it was currently receiving in an attempt to process the bewildering scene. The spell was broken when Leary's fingers unclenched and the head, which Craig now recognised as belonging to the priest's wife, dropped to the floor with a sickeningly wet thump. Her eyes were open, staring directly at Craig, and he felt as though something in his mind was suddenly being stretched taut, close to snapping.

Drunk, he thought, as he dropped instinctively into a defensive crouch, backing up as far as the narrow bar allowed.

The thought was ridiculous. Craig had been drunk before; hell, he'd spent most of the last few years wandering round in a warm stupor, and he'd never come close to decapitating anyone. Still, it was what his beleaguered brain offered up and, for now, he would go with it.

"Stop right there, Father," he cried, and was unnerved to hear his own voice, high pitched and tremulous. His tone, which he had hoped would be authoritative, was instead plaintive. He sounded like a child begging a stern parent to stay up late.

Craig's mind reeled: he knew Peter Leary fairly well. He was the man who had performed his wedding ceremony. And that other ceremony, the one that occupied the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. The one he tried not to think about. The priest was a kind man, a man of enviable virtue and patience. Never in a million years would Craig have considered him to be a threat to anyone.

For a moment his words did seem to have an effect: the priest stopped, swaying a little, as though unsteady on his feet, his head whipping from Ralf to Craig and back again, as if he was struggling to make some terrible decision.

The fog in Craig's mind lifted a little, and he raced through his options. The priest was a bear of a man: at six foot two he had four inches on Craig, and was probably fifty pounds his superior in weight. He was not carrying any weapon that Craig could see. Leary's hands were empty, stained red with blood, but it was his eyes that truly made Craig's nerves dance uncontrollably. The man's eyes were impossibly wide, the whites a bright, angry red. Blood trickled from them like tears.

The priest seemed to make up his mind and lurched half a step toward Craig, when Ralf, who had been attempting to inch his way backwards, toward the door at the far end of the bar that led to the café's small stockroom, nudged the coffee pot on the bar with his ample gut, sending it crashing to the floor. Leary's head whipped toward the noise. The movement was animalistic, like a tiger catching sight of prey moving through the long grass.

It happened in an instant. The priest pounced like a starving animal, clear across the bar and onto Ralf with a ragged, gurgling roar.

And bit him. Bit his god-damned nose clean off, tossing the ripped chunk of flesh aside with a flick of his neck, before darting forward again and sinking his teeth into the soft, quivering flesh of Ralf's neck.

The fat man hit the deck, the priest straddling him in a grim mockery of a lover's embrace. An arterial spray of blood painted the wall red behind them.

For Craig, autopilot took over. Without thought, he scooped up a bar stool in one smooth motion and swung it like a nine iron into the priest's right flank, sending the big man crashing into the stove, which spat up a griddle's worth of crispy bacon and searing, bubbling fat over the man's head.

A new smell hit Craig's nostrils, a sweet, sickening fragrance that brought bile to the back of his throat. The priest lay motionless at the base of the stove, his face sizzling.

Craig shot a glance at Ralf, lying on his back, a bubble of blood and saliva on his lips. Ralf's neck had a tear, perhaps four inches across, from which blood poured at obscene speed. Ralf's eyes were moving, locking onto Craig's gaze with an intense pleading. He looked like a frightened child.

Craig waved a clearly unnecessary stay put gesture toward Ralf, and turned to see the priest hauling himself unsteadily to his feet.

The priest's face was a vision from a demented nightmare, flesh melted away from his skull, partially revealing bone. Both eyes were gone, rendered liquid, oozing down across his cheeks, fusing with the superheated meat that had been his nose and jaw.

This time Leary sprang forward without hesitation, teeth bared, an inhuman rage-fuelled scream tearing from his lungs, but the attack was blind, and Craig had time to roll to the side, narrowly avoiding the priest's landing.

As he rolled, Craig's fingers found the shards of Ralf's dropped plate. He tried to stand, intending to brandish the makeshift weapon to deter the priest, but already aware on some level that the move would be futile.

He didn't get the chance.

Before Craig had even regained his balance Leary was upon him, strong fingers closing around his neck, forcing him back to the floor. Stars exploded across Craig's vision as the back of his head connected hard with the tiles, and terror threatened to overwhelm him. The priest's fingers closed like a vice, slowly, inexorably crushing his windpipe.

He had no other option.

No time to think.

He drove the shard of porcelain into the priest's neck, drove it hard. No self-defence, this; it was a killing blow. He felt warm blood splash onto his hand, and drove further, twisting and tearing with the weapon, oblivious to the pain as sharp edges sliced into his palm.

After an eternity, the thick fingers on his throat slackened and slipped away. Air exploded into his lungs. Nothing had ever tasted as sweet.

With a grunt, Craig hauled himself out from beneath the priest's heavy body, painful hacking coughs ripping through his damaged throat. He climbed to his feet using the bar for support, nearly pulling his still-steaming coffee down onto himself in the process. The entire attack had taken less than a minute.

Turning towards Ralf, he felt his heart sink. The jovial bar owner had been a little slow, but made up for it with a perma-smile and a warm heart. Now, in death, his features were contorted with anguish and pain, his gaze fixed on the ceiling. The flow of blood from the wound in Ralf's neck had slowed to a trickle, a bright red river leading to a vast ocean that spread across the tiles, mingling with the ground-in coffee and ketchup. Ralf's words came back to Craig, suddenly tragic.

The colour of life, that is.

It would be the last conscious thought to cross Craig Haycock's mind. Moments later, his focus was entirely taken by his blood, which suddenly felt as if it were boiling in his veins.

# Chapter 2

The pace of life in rural South Wales was slow as pouring treacle, but below the surface, where the town was powered by the gasoline of rumour and gossip, things moved at breakneck speed. Information was the town's real currency and its people had all the riches they could wish for. No secret remained kept for long.

So it was that Mrs Paula Roberts, baker's wife, proud mother of children long departed for the bright lights and better prospects of London and Birmingham; owner of a mouth that transmitted at broadband speed, came to be walking her dog in the chilly morning air on the day things began to unravel.

Dogs were messy, dirty animals in Mrs Roberts' opinion, but having relented after months of pestering by her then-teenage son, she soon discovered that they presented an excellent reason for hovering around the gardens of her neighbours. And the gardens of the neighbours were exactly the place to be if you wanted to know what was what and who was who.

Often she would let the terrier, renamed 'Sniffer' after the kids had flown the coop, due to what Mrs Roberts believed to be an excellent nose for town politics (or at least the gardens in which those politics were discussed) decide on the route of his morning walk.

This morning he had turned left out of the driveway and it had proved an excellent choice. Eyebrows were raised and mental notes taken as she had walked past the Chapman house and heard a man's laughter drifting from the open bedroom window, for Mrs Roberts knew full well that young Shelly Chapman's husband was away on business. Sniffer got a crunchy treat for that one.

The rest of the walk proved to be a disappointing affair: mostly quiet houses and empty gardens, the residents of St. Davids opting to stay in the warmth of their beds for as long as possible before their varying responsibilities dragged them out into the cold, misty morning.

Disappointing, that is, until Sniffer finally led Mrs Roberts past the house at which Father Leary and his wife had lived for the last three decades.

At this early hour, silence hung over the town, riding the coattails of the sea mist that usually cleared up by mid-morning. And so it was inevitable that Mrs Roberts, whose ears during these walks were alert like wartime radar, heard the odd cry.

It had come from Father Leary's house, of that there was no question. It wasn't a scream; wasn't a shout of anger. Indeed, Mrs Roberts may well have dismissed it altogether, as the cry of someone who'd dropped their morning toast perhaps, or stubbed a toe climbing out of the bath, were it not for the way the sound ended.

Abruptly. And with a strange, wet gurgle. A very odd noise. A noise that required further investigation.

Mrs Roberts had a system for investigating the gardens of her neighbours (everyone in the town was considered a neighbour, no matter how far away they actually lived from her) and it was beautiful in its simplicity: show a treat to Sniffer, take off the mutt's leash, toss the treat as far onto the neighbour in question's property as possible, and let the dog's stomach do the rest.

As a means of trespassing on the property of other people it was foolproof, so much so that people often thanked Mrs Roberts for coming to pull her dog out of their garden before it decided to start dropping presents on their lawn.

The noise had come from the rear of the house, no doubt, and so she discreetly hurled a crunchy treat as far down the path to the side of the house as possible and set Sniffer to work. The terrier, eyes wide and focused solely on the bone-shaped treat, flew off down the path, oblivious to half-hearted cries of 'bad dog, Sniffer!'

After waiting a moment or two, and wearing a look of exasperation for those who may be watching, Mrs Roberts set off after the apparently rogue dog, who was now happily munching his way through the evidence of his master's transgression.

As she rounded the corner to Father Leary's back garden, she heard the front door slam behind her and turned to see the man himself leave. He was walking oddly — stiffly — and carrying something she couldn't make out before he disappeared from view.

Equally odd was the direction Leary took, turning left, heading away from the town and the Cathedral that served as his home for most of the day.

Mrs Roberts heaved a dramatic sigh. Her chance to eavesdrop had almost certainly passed, unless Father Leary's wife was prone to talking to herself.

She leaned down to reattach Sniffer's leash, but the dog squirmed out of her grasp with an excited yelp, and dashed out of sight behind the house.

Sighing again, Mrs Roberts rounded the corner, and mentally readied her apology to Mrs Leary who would no doubt see her trespassing from the kitchen window.

And stopped.

The leash fell to the ground unnoticed as she clasped her hands to her face in horror.

Sniffer was bounding excitedly around a pool of blood; a dark stain on concrete that steadily mushroomed from the obscene space where Mrs Leary's head had been, the remainder of her body splayed awkwardly across the step in front of the open patio doors.

The horror of the sight stole away Mrs Roberts' thoughts, leaving her feeling heavy and immobile. This went far beyond gossip.

This was the mother lode.

As the shock of the grisly scene in the Leary garden began to subside, the next steps came to the fore. Clearly, Mrs Roberts had to be the one who broke the news to the residents of St. Davids, and so, really, she should be heading toward the tiny police station near the town's main shopping area. Hopefully, of course, some of the residents would have emerged from their cocoons as she made the journey.

Mrs Roberts was just mulling over this, when the garden offered up another odd sight that caught her attention. Some distance from the back door, toward the rear of the lawn, was a hole in the grass, fairly deep.

She walked cautiously over to it, and stared down, intrigued. The hole was an odd shape, perfectly round, and very deep. Had Father Leary killed his wife, planning to bury her under the garden like some character in a soap opera?

Mrs Roberts pondered this, and all the possible ramifications for the town and its people, for a long while. Lost in thought, she paid no attention to Sniffer, who lapped happily at the spreading pool of blood around Mrs Leary's corpse.

*

It was possible to walk around the centre of St. Davids, taking in each and every one of the picturesque cobbled streets in little more than a couple of hours. That time would likely have been almost halved but for the erratic nature of the tiny city's layout: like many of the ancient rural towns of Wales, the seemingly randomly angled roads would most likely provoke nightmares in the average modern-day town planner.

For the most part, although the streets were not officially pedestrianised, traffic avoided the centre of town simply because two cars attempting to occupy the same street at the same time would have to pull off some tricky manoeuvres in order to reach their destination. In addition, most would admit, there really was nothing in the city centre worth driving to.

There were shops, of course: small butcher's and baker's; even a tiny all-purpose hardware store, but the truth of the matter was that if you were shopping in one of those establishments, then you were likely no more than five minutes' walk from your front door, and frankly, it would take that long to navigate a car round some of St. Davids' more eccentric corners. It just wasn't worth it.

Those with cars – and despite the reliance on them virtually everywhere else, a surprising number of the residents didn't bother with owning a car at all – were more likely to head away from the town.

Even in this most rural part of Wales, a superstore wasn't too far away. Some twenty miles east in Haverfordwest, a giant, gleaming Tesco supermarket had opened a few months previously, and, as is the way with these out-of-town monoliths, it exerted a gravitational pull that could be felt for many miles. Buy one get one free is, after all, hard to resist.

Of course, none of this mattered to the two occupants of the police car, who were obliged to crawl through the cobbled streets at least once a day, 'maintaining a visible presence'. Two hours to walk. Almost double that to drive.

Michael had intended to head through the middle of town early on, before lunchtime drew people out of their houses and onto the cobbled streets they treated as just another pavement, making progress for a car all but impossible, but Carl - his mind still clearly and unashamedly fixated on a fried breakfast that his wife would have gladly pistol-whipped him for eating - had proven persuasive. They headed out toward the countryside.

Where the centre of the city was cramped; ancient creaking buildings obstinately clinging to the hills on which the town was built, as though huddling together for warmth, the outskirts were much more expansive. Tiny collections of dwellings – often no more than three or four old farm buildings – were dotted for miles around, each proudly declaring itself a village in its own right, and the police car dutifully made its way around them all most days, though in truth that was more attributable to the boredom that was the default atmosphere of the police station than any conscientious work ethic.

As expected, these routine checks never turned up anything. Sometimes the residents waved at the car, occasionally signalling Michael or Carl to wind the window down and stop for a chat, maybe even a cup of tea. The most likely occurrence was, of course, getting stuck behind a tractor.

This morning, however, as the car eased through the roads towards Ralf's café and the promise of bacon and eggs, the roads were all but empty, and the miles passed quickly, though not quickly enough judging by the rumbles of complaint emanating from Carl's stomach.

"You hear that?" The big man sighed. "Cholesterol," he said with a derisive snort. "Hunger'll get me long before that does."

Michael looked at his partner dubiously. Carl had the physique of a man who could survive being stranded on an uninhabited island longer than most.

They were on the beach road, moving swiftly, and Ralf's café - a lonely sort of building set against a hill and with a view of a tiny sliver of ocean beyond - drew closer.

"Try to hold on, mate," Michael said. "Don't go dying on me now. We're so close."

Carl snorted. "You're buying. And just for that, I'll be sure to have an extra-"

He trailed off as Michael eased the car to a stop in the small patch of gravel that served as Ralf's car park.

Michael was staring at the door to the café, open-mouthed. Following his gaze, Carl suddenly moved breakfast down his list of priorities.

The door was shut, and across the whitewashed panel beneath the glass and the faintly ridiculous Bar and Grill sign, was a long, red smear.

"Is that...blood?" said Carl, unable to keep a note of wonder out of his voice.

Michael's jaw clenched.

"I'd say so."

Michael stared for a few seconds, and felt an odd lurch in his stomach; a feeling like returning home to continue an argument that had been temporarily postponed.

"Uh...what should we do?" Carl breathed.

It was a good question. There was something about the long, ragged smear that made the hairs on the back of Michael's neck stand up. Some relic of his outdated police training nagged at him, its voice indistinct.

In another time and place Michael would have suggested that they call it in, perhaps even call for backup. Here though, the truth was that there was no one to call. The single-storey St. Davids police station, barely big enough to house a couple of desks and a noticeboard, was home to a receptionist, a middle aged woman by the name of Glenda who specialised in making tea and conducting long, gossipy phone calls. What it did not contain was anything that could remotely be described as backup.

Michael scratched at his chin, lost in thought.

"Okay," he said after a pause. "Stay here and call it in to Glenda. Tell her if she doesn't hear from us in five minutes, she needs to put in a call to Haverfordwest. Then follow me in.

"Here, take these." He passed Carl the car keys. "If this turns out bad, get out of here, get some backup."

"You want to check it out on your own? Is that safe?" Carl's eyes were wide.

Michael shrugged. "Just going to take a peek. If there's someone in there waiting with a weapon, I'd rather we didn't both have our faces pressed up against the glass, you know?"

Carl looked dubious. He was no expert, but this did not sound like standard procedure.

Michael caught the look on his partner's face and forced a smile.

"Hey, I'm sure it's nothing. Probably just Ralf cut himself trying something a little more ambitious than frying bacon is all. Don't worry, we'll get you fed yet."

He slapped Carl's gut and got out of the car before the big man could protest, shutting the door behind him quietly.

The bloody door was about fifteen feet away. Michael crept toward it, muscles tensed, ears straining for any sound coming from inside the building. There was none.

It was only when he was almost at the threshold that Michael noticed spots of blood on the path leading to the door, and felt his pulse quicken. Trouble had found its way to the cafe, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

He paused, and shot a glance back at the car. Carl was on the radio, his eyes fixed on Michael.

Michael cocked his head to the side. Still no sound. Nothing at all.

Michael thought about the multitude of American cop shows that were strewn across the television channels; thought about some grizzled homicide detective approaching a closed door, gun in hand, ready to face the danger head on.

On TV, the detective would kick the door open, pop three rounds into the perp's chest and head back to the station to get shouted at by his chief. Michael didn't have a gun or a chief: what he had was a can of long-unused pepper spray and judgement that hadn't been called upon for so long it had probably rusted over.

He reached for his belt and pulled the spray out of its holster, briefly wondering if the damn thing could possibly be out of date, and as much use as a can of deodorant.

He took another step, and could now see that there was more blood than he had realised at first. A small pool of it gathered around the base of the door. The sight made him waver for a moment, and he felt his nerves getting the better of him.

"Fuck it," he whispered to himself, trying vainly to persuade his courage to up its game. Adrenaline kicked in, and Michael stepped in front of the door, peering into the dimly lit café beyond.

His eyes adjusted, pupils widening.

Then he bent double and retched.

*

He ran.

He loved to run.

He very rarely got the chance, not to really run. Sure, there were times when he managed to break into a jog; more often into what could best be described as a disappointing trot. Hardly ever an outright run.

The main reason, naturally, was her. She didn't like it when he ran, and he always got a telling off that left him feeling humbled and fearful. And there were the obstructions, of course. Where he lived, it seemed to be all obstructions; all strange shapes and blockages. Pointless corners and walls that were sometimes there, sometimes not. No chance at all to run there.

And inevitably, when he tried, the admonishment was especially severe.

The infuriatingly short occasions on which he was allowed to visit other places was when he could sometimes up the pace a little, but he had learned the hard way that he could only get so far before he was stopped suddenly, and painfully.

It was torture. Because he wanted to run so very much. Things in the distance were always so much more intriguing, and he worried that by the time he got to them, they would be gone. Running was the only solution, and it was forbidden. It was a source of terrible frustration and confusion to him. He did not understand why it was bad to run; only that running had consequences. He hated the consequences.

Now, however, he was running, and it was glorious: flat-out sprinting, and the feel of the wind pushing back his ears and the cold numbing his tongue was truly wonderful. Strangely, he found that he suddenly did not care about the consequences. He only cared about the running.

"Bad dog Sniffer!"

She sounded distant, but there was no mistaking the words. The same words he heard most days, though this time there was steel in the tone; menace that could not be overlooked.

It angered him, and that surprised him. Ordinarily that tone meant consequences. At the very least it meant that she would not fish into the paper bag of delicious treats today, and he would probably end up with nothing more to eat than the dry, tasteless pebbles that came out when he was Bad Dog. That was usually enough to stop him, but today felt different.

He felt different.

Felt something stirring inside him, something powerful and irresistible; something that felt oddly like it had been taken away from him and now returned. Something that made him whole.

There was pain, too: a stinging, incessant stabbing that began in his eyes and seemed to reach back into his brain, tearing at him, making him feel helpless and furious all at once.

He stopped running, and turned to face his master. She approached, red-faced and puffing for air, and reached for the cord that he had snatched from her hands, the one that hurt his throat and always prevented his attempts to run.

When she was close enough, he put his head down, flattened his ears and stared into her eyes.

And growled.

Mrs Roberts practically leapt backwards in surprise, and she had to admit, a little fear.

Moments earlier, she had been standing in the tiny St. Davids police station, smugly telling that bitch Glenda Davis that she had very important information about a crime, and that no, sadly she couldn't tell Glenda anything about it, but felt she had to wait to speak to an actual police officer.

The look on Glenda's face had been priceless.

Mrs Roberts hated Glenda; hated her not just because she had once had the cheek to accuse Mrs Roberts' daughter of assaulting her son (assault! A playground scuffle, assault!) but more to the point, because Glenda was her only rival as the biggest gossip in town, and Glenda had an unfair advantage.

How was Mrs Roberts to compete when Glenda's job was to answer the phone and have local scandal handed to her on a plate? Glenda got to know it all: who was drunk, whose husband had been fighting who. Even what went on behind closed doors, even if a husband was beating up his wife! The very thought of it made Mrs Roberts shudder.

Thankfully, the crime rate in the town was so low, so virtually non-existent, that Glenda Davis' gossip never truly even reached Defcon 3 status (Mrs Roberts liked to brand her gossip thus, perceiving that a Defcon 5 would get most people in the town murmuring and raising an eyebrow, while a Defcon 1 would provoke genuine outrage throughout) and now, deliciously, St. Davids had a genuine, honest-to-God Defcon 1 criminal event, and it was she who knew all about it. Not Glenda.

Just thinking about it made her tremble with delight.

The occasion, however, had been ruined. Barely as soon as she had begun to gloat, intending to draw out Glenda's curiosity for at least fifteen minutes, the woman's desk phone had rung, and she had put on an (impressive, Mrs Roberts had to admit) act of being shocked at some vital piece of news, before telling Mrs Roberts that she would have to leave, as Glenda had some important confidential police work to carry out.

Her emphasis on the word important made Mrs Roberts seethe. She knew full well what that bitch was implying.

As if that was not bad enough, when Mrs Roberts had planted her hands on her ample hips, preparing to tell Glenda Davis that she was going nowhere, thank-you-very-much, the damn dog had slipped its leash away from her grasp and bolted out of the door.

And now, here she stood, panting and sweating in the misty morning, having been forced into an embarrassing, wobbling sprint by her own dog. Glenda would no doubt be laughing her obnoxious head off.

The very thought enraged Mrs Roberts, and she glared at Sniffer.

The dog was hostile, no doubt about it; its eyes levelled at her in a clear, confident challenge.

She took a step toward Sniffer and faltered as the growl deepened. Then Glenda Davis's irritating, high-pitched laugh resonated in her mind, and Mrs Roberts set her jaw, took a couple of shuffling, surprisingly agile steps forward, and grabbed the dog's collar firmly. Sniffer writhed and growled, but there was nothing the little terrier could do.

Mrs Paula Roberts was not about to be made a fool by a tiny dog, no thank-you-very-much, not today.

Hauling the wriggling terrier, Mrs Roberts set off for home, determined that Sniffer would learn that Bad Dogs could contemplate the consequences of their actions tied to a post in the cold garden, and on an empty stomach.

*

"Mary, mother of God," Carl said, his voice an awestruck whisper.

They stood just inside Ralf's café; just inside a nightmare.

The walls and floor of the café were painted with blood, an impossibly large river of which flowed from the body of Ralf, the owner, who appeared to have had his throat torn out by some wild animal. Ralf lay motionless in the narrow space behind the bar, while in the middle of the room was the body of Father Leary. A shard of porcelain jutted out of the dead priest's neck, but it was his face that Carl fixated on in horror: flesh melted into a shapeless mass that clung to his skull raggedly; eyes gone.

The worst of it though, was at their feet, just inside the doorway.

Carl stared down at the decapitated head, and felt the few mouthfuls of muesli he'd forced down that morning trying to force their way back up.

He stumbled backwards into the open air, and sucked in a huge lungful of oxygen.

Michael had regained his composure, at least in part. "You called Glenda?" He said, his voice flat.

Carl nodded, gasping for air. "Yeah," he managed through clenched teeth.

"Good. I think we're gonna need help with this one."

"No shit."

Michael stepped into the bar area, scanning the room. Pieces of smashed plate were scattered over the floor, and the bar stools were toppled, one with a leg snapped clean in two.

He crept carefully around the smears of blood, careful not to move anything, and crouched next to Ralf's body.  The man's flabby neck was torn apart, ripped rather than cut. Michael looked back at the shards of porcelain still dotted around the floor, and shook his head slowly.

"Both dead, yeah?"

Carl had stepped back into the café, and his voice made Michael jump. He didn't respond.

"What the fuck happened here, Mike? It's like something out of one of those movies you know? The clown ones, with the guy dying of cancer."

Carl was babbling, and Michael tuned him out. Once upon a time, he had been trained for this, and there was a time he had expected he would be good at it. Looking at the shattered and obscured pieces of a picture and putting it back together.

This picture was horrific, baffling, but there was also something wrong with it. He frowned, lost in thought.

Carl's voice rattled on, approaching hysteria. "I mean, this ain't down town Los Angeles, you know? This is fucking St. Davids for Christ's sake. Who the hell is going to murder Ralf? And Father Leary! And that thing over there, my God, I-"

"No murder weapon," Michael interrupted.

Carl stopped mid-sentence. "Huh?" he grunted. "The plate-"

"Looks like that's what did for Father Leary alright," Michael agreed. "But this wound on Ralf's neck? No chance. See how it's all ragged and torn up?"

He pointed at the gaping chasm that had been Ralf's windpipe. Carl gulped.

"That wasn't a sharp instrument, at least, not like this."

Michael pointed at the plate.

"And what about her? Even if someone did that with a broken plate, where's the body?"

Carl shook his head miserably, looking like he might be sick.

Michael stood up straight, both knees clicking, the sound impossibly loud in the oppressive silence. He looked around the room again, searching for some weapon that he had overlooked.

"See if you can spot anything Carl," he said. "Any sort of weapon that could have done this. But don't move anything, okay?"

Carl nodded, and began to step gingerly through the room, crouching to look under the small dining tables.

Michael swept his eyes around again, and they came to rest on Father Leary's body. Just maybe...

He stepped around the blood and crouched next to the priest's corpse, hoping to  spot a glint of dangerous metal pinned underneath the body.

No sign.

Michael sighed in frustration. The scene made no sense at all. He shifted his gaze to the priest's face, as though he might find the answer written in the dead man's eyes.

And his stomach lurched.

"Oh Jesus," Michael cried, stepping back quickly from the body as though it might explode at any moment, and almost slipping on Ralf's blood.

"What? What is it?" Carl almost shouted the words, panic clear in his voice.

"It's...our murder weapon. Fucking hell."

"Huh?" Carl said, moving closer to Michael's position.

"Where?"

Michael pointed wordlessly at the priest's face.

Carl followed the gesture, squinting, his eyes slowly widening in horror.

The priest's mouth was full of blood, and there, stuck in the gaps between his teeth, were strips of torn flesh and matted hair.

Carl's ongoing battle with his morning muesli finally resolved itself loudly and messily.

"He tore Ralf's throat out like a fucking dog," Michael said, his voice laced with wonder. "Killed his wife somewhere else, then brought her head here and killed Ralf. With his damn teeth."

Carl choked, and spat bile onto the floor.

"Doesn't make any sense," he moaned miserably. "Father Leary? The guy wouldn't harm a fly. Fuck's sake, the guy would pray for the soul of someone who did harm a fly! How the hell does a man like that behead his own wife and rip out a man's throat? What is it? Drugs? Did he just lose his mind? He christened my neighbour's baby a week ago! A week! Doesn't make any sense."

Carl shook his head, eyes squeezed shut, as though trying to shake off a bad dream.

The voice nagged at the corners of Michael's mind again. The scene was still wrong. It didn't make sense. He turned, and stared again at Ralf's inert body.

"So Ralf stuck him," Carl said, his expression sour. "Self defence. Too good for the bastard. Too quick."

"No, I don't think so," Michael said softly. He was looking intently at Ralf's chubby hands. "Look here. Ralf's hands are clean. No blood. Not even a cut. If you're gripping a piece of that plate hard enough to stab someone, you have to cut yourself at least a little right? You have to get the other guy's blood on your hands don't you?"

Carl looked at him, mystified.

"I don't understand," he said.

Michael stared at him, eyes glittering. "Someone else was here, mate. The question is: where are they now?"

# Chapter 3

The coffee in the little red thermos was stale, but Michael gulped it down anyway, keen to wash the taste of bile from the back of his throat. He glanced at Carl, who was eyeing up the remaining doughnut, probably for the same reason, but obviously thought better of it.

The older man rubbed absent-mindedly at his recently-evacuated stomach, his expression pained.

"Ever come across anything like this before, Mike?"

Carl was a good two decades older than Michael, but the younger man had actually spent a handful of years serving on the Force in Cardiff. On matters relating to actual police work, he deferred to the younger man's experience.

Michael shook his head, and tipped the dregs of the coffee down his throat.

They were leaning up against the car, facing the café warily, like a gazelle keeping one eye on a distant dozing lion. Carl had asked Glenda to put through a call for assistance, but, as with most things in South Wales, it would take time to arrive. So they waited. Outside.

"No, nothing like this, not even close," Michael said. "A few violent-ish crimes I suppose, mostly domestic stuff. But nothing like you'd get in the movies. No bodies ripped apart. No serial killers putting on a show."

He looked away from the café, gazing into the trees, his vision clouded.

"Mostly it was just the same things you get here. Drunks. Theft. Just on a bigger scale. Violence? Mostly down to kids getting hold of knives really. Any time that cropped up it was...sad, really. Kind of pathetic. Not like this at all.

"I don't know what you'd call this."

Carl nodded morosely.

Michael thought for a second. There had been the one time, of course. The time he didn't like to think about. The event that popped back into his mind like an uninvited guest occasionally, and sometimes refused to leave. He focused his gaze on the gravel at his feet. Pushed the dark memories back into the gloom.

The two men fell silent for several seconds, until Carl could bear it no more. The air felt heavy, claustrophobic. Today, the morning fog didn't appear to be going anywhere, and the thick grey morning was constricting his throat, making him feel like he was about to choke. Got to do something, he thought. Anything is better than standing here thinking.

He stood, and made his way to the boot, popping it open with a click. Inside, buried under macintoshes and flashlights, he found a roll of police tape. It had been sitting there unused for years.

He grabbed it, walked to the Cafe sign, and began to tie off one end. There was a tree opposite he could use to barricade the entrance.

Michael smiled thinly, and gestured at the empty road.

"Worried about the crowds getting in there, mate?"

Carl shook his head.

"No, it's just....keeping busy you know? Standing around waiting...feels like I'm going to lose my mind here."

He kept his eyes focused intently on his work, tying off the tape securely, and began to stretch it out across the doorway to the café.

After watching for a moment, Michael went to help.

*

The mist coiled around the crooked cobbled streets of St. Davids, settling at ground level, spreading across the city like a stain.

On the coastal road, it wreathed the work of the two police officers, silent and grim-faced, as they set about cordoning off the horrors residing in Ralf's Cafe.

On Broad Street, it filled the small, perfectly manicured garden of the Roberts house, hiding from view the small dog leashed to a garden post and muting his snarling rage at his sudden captivity.

All across the town, as the good people of St. Davids emerged from their warm cocoons, blinking blearily and hunching against the cold, the mist roiled, pushed this way and that by the wind, but refusing to dissipate.

To the people, a foggy morning was nothing unusual, though a few remarked on how thick the fog seemed that day, and drivers grimaced as they crawled along, barely able to see beyond their windscreens.

At 9.17am Rachel Roberts shuddered as she stepped off the toy-like two-carriage train onto the tiny strip of concrete that served as the railway station for St. Davids.

A few years in London had softened her up, clearly. She'd forgotten about the morning fog and the damn wind that whistled through the streets almost incessantly, making a mockery of all but the heaviest of coats.

Rachel released her grip on the handle of her suitcase (trolley-style, thank God, given the weight of the thing) and fished around her pockets for her cigarettes and a lighter. Lighting up, she inhaled deeply, and allowed the hit of the nicotine to calm her down. Four hours on crowded trains with no chance to smoke had left her frazzled.

For a few moments she savoured the smoke, banishing the freezing cold to the back of her mind. This may very well be her last chance to have a cigarette for two days.

Rachel's mother had no idea that her daughter had become addicted to what she called the 'foul weed' during her years at university and, for both their sakes, Rachel intended to keep it that way. As a result, trips home to visit the folks quickly became fraught affairs, as withdrawal made Rachel snappy and edgy. She'd often considered the various ways in which she might be able to slip away for a crafty smoke, but in the end had never tried.

Her mother had eyes like a CCTV camera, and in St. Davids people talked. Even if there were some plausible excuse for Rachel to disappear for ten minutes, she knew in her heart that someone would see her, and the information would find its way back to Mum. Information always did.

She dropped the cigarette stub and crushed the life out of it under the heel of her boot, casting a glance around the pitiful excuse for a station. After a couple of years spent being carried along on a tide of people in cavernous hubs like Waterloo and Euston, the homely little platform seemed prehistoric. It symbolised the town perfectly.

Like many of the young people growing up in the area, Rachel had come to view St. Davids as an enemy, oppressing her and stifling her dreams and ambitions.

Beyond hanging out with friends on street corners and in parks, trying to get hold of alcohol and failing because everyone in the damn place knew exactly who she was as well as her age, there had been little here to relieve the boredom of her teenage years.

Rachel had left home at twenty-one, as soon as her stint at university had finished, convinced that a life of excitement and riches awaited her in London. Instead her degree had secured her only a job as personal assistant to a lawyer with wandering hands and a wage that would have been more than comfortable in South Wales, but which barely kept the heating on in England's capital.

Though the proud set of her jaw as she walked along the platform suggested otherwise, she was returning home at twenty-five with more than a hint of tail between her legs.

A small bridge took her from the platform up and over the tracks toward the car park on the other side. Rachel started up it, surprised and grateful to find that what had once been a set of steps was now a ramp, allowing her to wheel rather than carry the heavy case. Signs of progress, she supposed, or maybe it was just the case that even a town as forgotten and remote as St. Davids had not escaped the talons of health and safety regulations.

When she reached other side of the bridge and stepped into the little car park, Rachel pulled up in surprise and disappointment. It was empty.

On the infrequent occasions that she had returned home over the past four years her father had always been there to greet her, perched on the bonnet of the car, ready to sweep her off her feet and into a bear hug that threatened to crack ribs.

Each time it happened, she'd struggled free, embarrassed by the public display of affection, but secretly anticipation of that hug had always made the long journey seem shorter, and his absence this time stung like a slap.

He'd taken her at her word, she supposed glumly, suddenly regretting all the times she had told him she was a grown woman now, perfectly capable of making her own way home. She remembered how the enormous grin on his face had faded with the words and felt her heart break a little.

Rachel felt suddenly unnerved at the idea that her parents might finally have adjusted to the absence of their little girl, and for the first time felt uncertainty about how her father would react to the news that her temper had once again landed her in trouble, this time at the cost of her job.

She was mentally prepared for the reaction of her mother to the news that Rachel hoped to move home for a while, ready for the scolding and the disappointed looks. But Dad could always be relied on to fight her corner, and she was secure in the knowledge that Jim Roberts would always look out for his little girl.

Alone in the foggy, deserted car park, that knowledge suddenly did not seem at all secure.

Reaching into her jeans pocket, Rachel pulled out the tiny smart phone that had become her main link to the bustling world of the internet, intending to ring her father to ask for a lift. Jason, her younger brother, would have been an option, but she knew that he was driving down from Birmingham, and would not arrive until later. Time to swallow the pride and ask Daddy to pick her up.

No signal.

Rachel rolled her eyes and sighed in exasperation. Her mother had promised that technology had finally reached St. Davids, that it was possible to get a mobile phone signal anywhere in the area now, but clearly nothing had changed. Landing on the platform at St. Davids station was like landing in the 1970s.

There was nothing else for it. She'd have to walk.

Come on Rach, she thought. It's only a couple of miles. Get on with it, you're a grown woman now, remember?

She pulled up the collar of the fashionable (but definitely not practical as it turned out) Vivienne Westwood coat that was her prized possession, grimaced as the biting wind tore straight through the flimsy fabric, and trudged toward the centre of town.

In her wake, the fog rode swirling gusts of wind and writhed around the empty street like a live thing.

*

It was taking too long.

Michael frowned and glanced at his watch, not for the first time. It had been at least thirty minutes since Carl had spoken to Glenda. There had been no further communication.

Carl had insisted on using up half the roll of tape, and the entrance to Ralf's Cafe now looked like some vast spider had woven a complicated, untidy web across the trees that straddled the gravel driveway. They had worked in silence, each unwilling to discuss the horrors of the café, unable to think of anything appropriate to fill the resulting vacuum.

"Something's wrong."

It was Carl who finally broke the silence. His voice sounded strained, taut.

Michael looked at him inquisitively. He was aiming to convey casual, but he knew from Carl's expression he was failing.

"Don't give me that look, Mike. You know it as well as I do. Maybe better, given how many times I've seen you looking at your watch. Why the hell haven't we had a response? It's been, like, forty five minutes. What the fuck?"

Michael glanced at his watch again.

"Thirty five."

Carl snorted.

"Okay, thirty five. Nothing about that strikes you as odd? We didn't report a stolen bike here. Fucking hell, we reported that the ghost of Jeffrey Dahmer is walking around South Wales chopping off heads and ripping out throats with his fucking teeth. Anything about that not sound urgent?"

"Maybe they're busy."

Another snort.

Michael stared thoughtfully at the yards of police tape stretched across the entrance. It was overkill, yet somehow appropriate. It mirrored the chaos inside the café. It was also messy; unprofessional. It spoke volumes about their preparedness to deal with the type of crime that now confronted them. If, for some reason, they had to deal with this alone for any length of time, Michael did not fancy that he and Carl would come out of the affair with perfect records. Too many chances to make mistakes. Too little expertise.

Carl, despite his natural tendency toward pessimism, was right. Unless riots had broken out in Haverfordwest – a town only marginally less sleepy than St. Davids itself – Michael could think of no reason why his phone hadn't been ringing immediately. They had stumbled onto the kind of crime that makes national news. The police always responded to that kind of crime hastily. It was, after all, the sort of thing that made careers.

So why was nothing happening?

The logical conclusion dawned on him almost immediately: Glenda. Of course. Glenda was, for the most part, good at her job, but certainly she had been known to let her attention wander. Obviously, she had not grasped the seriousness of their situation, and either hadn't made the call, or had somehow botched it.

Michael felt relief wash through him. It had felt like things were slipping away from him, and moving beyond his comprehension. The sudden realisation that the reason he and Carl had been left hanging must be nothing less mundane than Glenda gossiping instead of doing her job was like finding a tether to reality. It was frustrating, but also deeply familiar.

He cursed himself for not having the number of the station in Haverfordwest stored on his phone, then let out a chuckle.

Carl arched an eyebrow.

"I gotta worry about you losing your marbles now, Mike?"

Michael grinned, shaking his head.

"Damn place has got us spooked is all, mate. Nothing more mysterious going on here than a woman who should have called one number probably calling a dozen others instead to let half the town know that something big is going down at Ralf's café. The only mystery here is that we haven't had a stream of gawpers heading out this way yet."

Carl looked confused for a moment, then brightened.

"You think? I mean, I was pretty definite, and she said she'd get right on it."

"What else could it be, Carl? You said it yourself: this is straight off Crimewatch. Hell, this is straight out of Silence of the bloody Lambs or something. What possible reason would they have not to come here, or at least call us?"

Carl nodded slowly, and blew out a long breath that seemed to have been held in for a very long time.

"You got the number for Haverfordwest on your phone?" Michael asked. "Probably better to call 'em direct than have Glenda try to explain this."

Carl shook his head.

"Nope. I can barely work the thing well enough to have my wife and kids' numbers on there."

"Directory enquiries it is then. I'm damn sure not calling 999. I don't think they'd ever stop laughing."

Michael fished in his pocket and brought out the small silver phone that he carried everywhere, but rarely used. It was a good five years old. He tried a few months back, on a trip to Cardiff, to look into getting one of the smart phones that were everywhere now, but had in the end shied away from the idea. Just too confusing.

He flipped open the screen and began to hit the buttons, then stopped with a frown.

No signal.

The cold, gnawing sensation in his gut returned.

St. Davids was remote, but there was nowhere in the UK so remote that it didn't get mobile phone reception. Not anymore.

"Uh, you got signal on your phone, mate?" He asked Carl. "Mine's playing up."

Carl pulled out his phone, a distant ancestor even of Michael's, and stared at the screen, eyes narrowing.

"Got a little 'X' where the signal thing usually is." He looked at Michael. "That's odd right, both of us not having signal? We're not even on the same network are we? Does that matter?"

Michael grimaced. The tension in his stomach mounted, and he felt acidic burning rising up his throat. Stress. He knew the signs well.

"It's probably nothing," he said, though his tone was not as reassuring as he'd hoped. "Just means we'll have to go through Glenda, that's all. Let's hope she remembers how to use the radio."

He turned back toward the car, only about thirty feet away yet almost obscured by the gathering fog.

Before he could take a step toward it, a noise stopped him dead. A noise that froze his muscles and turned his blood to ice.

Somewhere, somewhere very close, a man was screaming.

*

It was 10am by the time Rachel reached her parent's house, the exertions of the walk and heaving the suitcase through the streets leaving an uncomfortable sheen of sweat under her coat that only made her colder as the freezing morning air hit it.

She had only seen a couple of people on the way, shuffling through the streets, huddled in heavy coats that looked warm and made her envious. She thought it odd that the town was so quiet – ordinarily you could rely on bumping into small groups of people nattering on street corners, curious as to who was out and about that day – but the cold and the fog had apparently proven uninviting to all but the hardiest souls.

Rachel was grateful for that. The worst part of having to walk home from the station was the thought that she would encounter familiar faces, most of whom would no doubt greet her with a big plastic smile and probing questions about just why she had returned. She had been spared that, at least, though she knew the escape was only temporary. The questions would come.

If anything the fog was getting heavier as morning meandered toward midday. Standing at the gate to her parent's driveway, Rachel couldn't remember ever seeing it so thick. From where she stood, the house was a barely discernible mass; a suggestion of a presence. Something to do with global warming, she supposed. The news had been full of odd weather phenomena over the past year, and one way or another the explanation was always the same: we are driving too much and recycling too little.

Rachel couldn't argue with that, but it certainly seemed a little odd to suggest that global warming was suddenly responsible for a year of earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis, and even one day during which six inches of snow had fallen on the north of England despite June being only a few days around the corner. It was as if the planet had suddenly decided that it had had enough of mankind, and was doing its level best to make life hell for humans.

She pushed open the gate and stepped past her father's van. At least he had been true to his word and taken a day off work, even if he hadn't remembered to come and pick his only daughter up at the station. As she headed for the door, she paid no attention to the little post that her mother occasionally tied Sniffer to when she deemed his behaviour unacceptable.

Didn't see the cord hanging limply from it, the end frayed as though it had been chewed through.

Reaching the front door, Rachel rang the doorbell, figuring that it would be quicker than rooting through her handbag to find her keys, and relishing the look of surprise on the face of whoever answered, no doubt expecting to be greeted by the postman rather than her.

The bell chimed through the house and was met with silence. After a few seconds Rachel depressed the button again and frowned. This didn't seem right. A shiver ran through her again. Suddenly, something about the house; the town; the impenetrable fog, just didn't seem right. She had the unnerving feeling that something was watching her and all of a sudden, standing with her back to the street, she felt exposed and vulnerable.

Why aren't they answering?

Her mother was quite likely to be out, making her morning rounds, her keen appetite for any and every morsel of gossip in the town as insatiable as ever, but if Dad was not at work – and he clearly wasn't – he would definitely be in the house. His role as the town's pre-eminent (only) baker was draining, and he often worked twelve-hour days. When he wasn't rolling out dough next to red-hot ovens, he was slumped on the couch, feet propped on the low coffee table, dozing his way through hours of Sky Sports News.

Feeling uneasy, Rachel quickly slung her handbag off her shoulder, unzipped it and located her keys. For a brief moment she wondered if her key would work; if for some reason the locks had been changed, and almost laughed in relief when the key slid into the lock easily and the door swung open.

Inside, the house was silent and still.

Rachel stepped inside, shutting the door behind her softly. She realised, as the door closed with a snick that she had been unconsciously trying to make no noise, as though something might hear her approaching.

She stood for a moment, frozen, listening. Nothing. What on earth was making her so damn jumpy?

"You're being ridiculous, Rachel," she suddenly said aloud. "Hello? Anyone home? Cold offspring here in need of a hot cuppa!"

There was no response. Rachel filled her lungs with air and hollered. "Mum? Dad?"

For some reason she could not quite identify, Rachel felt overpowering reluctance to venture further into the house. Fantastic scenarios played out in her mind, images of finding her parents murdered, or tied up and gagged in the bedroom, a masked intruder holding a blade to their throats. After a moment, she shook her head irritably. This is St. Davids, she told herself, not London. That sort of thing does not happen here.

Still she found herself rooted to the spot. Lifting her phone from her pocket, she turned on the display and navigated to her text messages, hoping to spot one that she had missed. Something from her father, telling her that she'd have to let herself in.

There was nothing. Just a message received a couple of hours earlier from her brother Jason, informing her that he would arrive a little while after her, and that he was looking forward to seeing Mum's face when she heard that Rachel was jobless and homeless. Punctuated by a smiley face. Bastard.

Just seeing the message brought a slight grin to her lips, and restored some semblance of normality to the morning. Suddenly Rachel felt silly, and a little ashamed to find herself so unnerved by nothing. Her parents were probably at the store picking up a few last-minute items for her visit. They loved to stock up on her old favourites whenever she returned home for a weekend, invariably buying enough food to sustain a small army, as though they were somehow concerned that she forgot to eat when she returned to live her own life.

My old life, now, Rachel thought sadly.

She shrugged off her coat, finding the house as cold as the streets had been. The heating had not been turned on. Maybe they had forgotten that she was coming home today after all. She grinned, thinking of the look on their faces when they returned home to find her waiting for them. Mum, in particular, would be mortified at the oversight.

The house was small, and with a typically mundane layout: two front rooms – a small living room now dominated by her father's prized possession: a gigantic flat screen television.

Opposite that room, on the other side of the entrance hallway, an equally sized room that for a while her mother had tried in vain to turn into a dining room (until she finally gave up the losing battle against eating in front of the TV) but which was now little more than a storage room.

At the back of the house, a large kitchen. This was Mum's territory. Dad baked for a living, and wanted nothing to do with ovens or ingredients when he was at home, and that was just the way Mum liked it. The kitchen was her kingdom, and she ruled it with an iron fist. Spotlessly clean. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Rachel peeked into the living room as she passed, just in case Dad was to be found fast asleep on the sofa. Empty. The door to her right was open, but she only gave the dining room a cursory glance. As expected, it too was empty, unless you counted the boxes of ornaments and old electrical equipment that her parents stored there, unable or unwilling to consign them to history and the rubbish dump.

Access to the kitchen was through an open-plan archway at the end of the entrance hall, directly opposite the front door. Rachel stepped to it, her only thought now: to get the kettle boiling and get some tea, a warm mug to clasp in her painfully frozen fingers. As she reached the arch, the reason for the temperature in the house became clear: the back door stood ajar.

Rachel's brow furrowed. Her parents were surely not out in town after all. No way would her mother leave the house and forget to lock up the door to her beloved kitchen.

The reason for the mysteriously empty house was suddenly clear, and ordinary enough to make Rachel's cheeks burn with embarrassment at her earlier feelings of panic: Dad was in the shed. Of course.

Rachel stepped past the island counter in the middle of the kitchen and leaned out of the back door, shivering as the temperature outside chilled her even further.

The garden was about thirty feet long and fairly narrow. The far left corner held a small shed.

"Dad!" Rachel yelled. "You want some tea? I'm boiling the kettle!"

No answer. The door to the shed was shut. He probably couldn't hear her.

Rachel turned around to grab the kettle.

And screamed.

The island in the middle of the kitchen had hidden it from her view, the thing which turned her world upside down. The thing that brought the panic back, a great wave of it making her heart hammer against her ribs.

The blood.

*

The scream hit Michael like an infection, winding round his intestines and squeezing, making his already frayed nerves howl.

The noise was terrible. High pitched, it sounded almost inhuman; an animal shriek. Michael clenched his fingers, digging his nails into his palm, struggling to resist the overwhelming urge to clap his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut.

The scream seemed to go on forever, rising in pitch, seemingly bouncing off the fog and multiplying until it was the world, filling his head, enveloping him in rolling, crashing terror.

It was the kind of noise that Michael imagined men had made hundreds of years before, in the days when battles were fought up close and personal, and the death of your enemy was a warm liquid that spilled over your hands. A noise that might have been designed to instil terror.

Carl staggered backward in surprise, and pressed his palms to his ears, his expression a cocktail of pain and mortal fear.

Michael persisted. The noise was human, or at least had been human when it started. What could drive a man to unleash such a noise he did not know nor did he want to speculate, but he had to know where it came from.

Close by, that was for certain. Given the volume almost certainly within fifty yards.

Danger close by. But in which direction?

Michael craned his neck left and right, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.

The scream wound down as though powered by failing batteries, and the resulting silence roared in Michael's ears. The effect was somehow even more insidious, even more unsettling, in a way he couldn't quite identify.

Carl uncovered his ears and stared at Michael, eyes wide. When he spoke his voice was a whisper, almost reverent.

"What the hell was that?"

Michael shook his head wordlessly. For the moment the more important question was where the hideous noise had come from. He cocked his head, listening intently.

The reason for his increasing unease hit him like the absence of pain.

A few years earlier Michael had wrenched his back, slipping a disc in the process. He hadn't been doing anything in particular, bending down to pick up a dropped pen. Just one of those times when the human body rebels, reminding its owner to pay a little more attention.

The pain: excruciating; all-encompassing, had been his travelling companion for a couple of weeks, riding roughly on his every action. It had taken mere minutes to acclimatise to the fact that the pain was now the dominant force in his life, so constant were its nagging reminders.

And then one morning Michael had woken up, left his bed, made some coffee and had breakfast, and was halfway through a shower when suddenly he realised that the pain had departed. All that time spent focusing on something only to find that one day it had slipped out of the back door, unnoticed.

The silence was like that. It crept around his consciousness for a while before realisation dawned. There was no noise. Nothing at all. At the very least the scream should have startled every bird in a radius of half a mile, sending them flapping away into the skies.

But there was nothing. Just the scream, and then the absence. Even the howling wind seemed to have held its breath. The effect was unsettling.

The fog, off which the noise seemed to have bounced and echoed, made it impossible to guess where the scream had come from.

Michael saw Carl open his mouth to speak and raised a hand to hush him, his ears straining to catch any sound.

He suddenly had the unshakeable feeling that somewhere, out there in the trees, wreathed in a blanket of thick fog, something else was listening just as intently, waiting for him to make a sound that would give away his position.

His skin crawled, and for a moment he felt his throat constrict in terror, certain that the painful thudding of his heart must be ringing out into the grey morning like the beat of a kick drum.

Michael held himself frozen for what felt like an age, before reason returned. He had to do something, had to flush out whatever was out there in the woods.

He motioned again to Carl, raising a hand in the universal gesture that said 'wait' and bent down, silently snatching up a pebble from the ground at his feet. It was small, barely weighing anything in his hand, and for a moment he doubted that, when thrown, it would make any sort of noise at all.

Yet if there was something out there, something listening for any sound, something waiting...

Michael's need to do something – anything – took over, and he launched the pebble into the fog to the left of the Café, well away from the tiny car park.

The world kicked back into life as though recovering from a power cut.

The pebble landed with a whimper; a barely audible thud, and suddenly something was crashing through the fog and trees to their left, seemingly oblivious to the branches and undergrowth, tearing toward the noise.

The shape burst from the trees, perhaps thirty feet in front of Carl and Michael, just close enough to make out in the fog. Michael squinted, trying to make out anything beyond the rough silhouette.

It was a man of average size. Alone. Yet there was something unusual about the figure, something awkward about its movements that seemed more animal than human.

The figure paused in roughly the location that Michael had tossed the pebble, head whipping back and forth violently, swinging left and right like a radar dish. Whoever it was, it was quickly apparent that the shape in the fog had not seen the two men standing to its right.

Michael raised a hand again to warn Carl to remain silent.

A beat too late.

"Christ!" Carl cried, his voice choked, "It's Craig Haycock."

Michael felt his stomach drop.

Things happened quickly then.

The silhouette's head whipped in the direction of Carl's voice, and with lightning speed the figure sprinted toward them. Michael had an instant to take in the man's features, his mind recoiling in horror. Haycock's chest was drenched, black with blood, but his face...

Long ragged tears ripped down the man's face, starting at the hairline, ending at the jaw. Tears made by fingernails.

He's ripped his own fucking eyes out.

"The car!" Michael cried, turning and sprinting toward the parking area.

He heard Carl's feet pounding behind him, and the crashing, chaotic footfalls of the eyeless, bloodied man. Getting closer.

Michael reached the car first, yanking open the passenger door and diving inside, his hip landing painfully on the handbrake. Even as the pain blossomed he heard the scream, a gurgling yelp of pure terror, and knew his partner hadn't made it.

Michael turned to see Carl stagger to one knee, Craig Haycock hanging from his neck, teeth buried into the big man's shoulder, blood washing over the smaller man's jaw.

For a moment Michael felt like he was watching one of those incredible BBC nature documentaries; watching in slow motion as some fierce creature, all teeth and claws, brought down its much larger prey through force of will and relentless animal aggression.

Carl tried to haul himself back to his feet, took another half step, unable to shake the smaller figure away, and then went down hard, his face smashing into the gravel.

Michael slammed the door shut and brought his elbow down on the lock. Outside, Carl moaned, low and bubbling, then fell silent. The silence made Michael's skin crawl almost as much as had the feeble, gurgling cry. He clasped his hands to his temples in horror, shaking his head, hoping to wake from the nightmare.

Outside, he saw Haycock leap to his feet – again that rapid, unnatural motion – his head swinging back and forth and blood oozing down his chin, searching for a sign of where the other part of his meal had gone. Michael felt his mind veering close to breaking point and clapped a hand over his mouth, suddenly afraid that he would not be able to keep himself from screaming.

Wide-eyed, Michael watched as Haycock began to prowl around, searching. Blind, yet terrible and dangerous, stalking about like a caged beast. He was maybe fifteen feet away from the car.

Only a matter of time...

Michael thought about the radio, but knew it was useless. Glenda would provide no help whatsoever, and he did not fancy his chances of surviving long if he had to wait there for backup to arrive. Coming from Haverfordwest, the best case scenario was half an hour. Too long.

Filled with remorse, his eyes welling up with burning tears at the thought of abandoning his partner, Michael took the only decision he had available to him.

Get away. Get help.

Michael reached into his pocket and felt a fresh surge of terror.

Carl had the keys.

# Chapter 4

So much blood.

Rachel let out a small, painful sob.

Something, she was now certain, was very, very wrong here.

A dark crimson pool sullied the otherwise pristine white tiled kitchen floor. But worse was the long smear that stretched some six or seven feet to the small closed door in the corner of the kitchen. The door that was marked by a clear red hand print just below the handle.

The door to the basement.

*

The car had become a prison cell.

Barely an hour earlier it had just been a car like any other, a place of empty coke cans, Carl's variable attempts at humour and MOR radio. Now it felt like a bear trap; like it had snapped metal jaws shut on Michael and would not let him go. Outside, the heavy fog sat, blocking out the light, turning the open clearing into a tiny, confined space.

He felt exposed. Long forgotten memories returned, of sitting in his grandfather's musty, quiet house, listening to his tales of working in the coal mines. Tales of unending darkness, of isolation so complete that the world on the surface began to feel like a half-remembered dream, of the omnipresence of death. Death watching, waiting; circling like a vulture.

He had to do something.

He was hunkered down low in his seat, as much as his six-foot frame would allow, though he knew the maniac outside could not see. Some relic of humanity's primitive past, he supposed. Some childlike superstition that if you could not see the boogeyman stalking you, then you would be safe.

The car offered more protection than hiding under a duvet cover like a frightened child, but not by much.

Judging by the savage way the blood-soaked, eyeless horror had attacked Carl, Haycock would not give a second thought to smashing his way through the windows and into the car to get at Michael.

Even as he hunched, holding his breath until his lungs felt ready to explode, Michael's mind searched for answers. What could have driven the sad, placid fisherman to this? He couldn't even guess. Drugs, perhaps, but everyone knew Haycock had hit the bottle hard after his wife had passed. Yet he was a morbid, morose drunk, never a violent one. As for anything harder than alcohol, it just didn't seem likely.

Michael forced himself back to reality. The stimulant for Haycock's sudden transformation into a monster would be important later. Of far more importance now was getting away from him, and getting some medical help for Carl.

He briefly considered attempting to hot wire the car, then dismissed the notion as ridiculous. It looked deceptively easy on TV, pop a panel, twist some wires together, commence cruising, but Michael was certain it took skill and knowledge that he did not possess. In any case, simply attempting the manoeuvre would make noise, and draw Haycock straight to him long before he could get the engine turning over.

He could sit and wait, hope than something else caught Haycock's attention or that he lost interest and wandered off.

He raised his head above the dashboard again, and saw Haycock prowling around some ten feet beyond the bonnet. As Michael watched, the mutilated face lifted toward the sky, face wrinkling.

He's sniffing, Michael thought, and felt an icy rush in the pit of his stomach. Surely he can't smell me?

Michael had heard that blindness could increase the effectiveness of the other senses. He had no idea whether it was a myth or not, but surely loss of sight didn't instantly boost the sense of smell or hearing. The thought was crazy. What on earth was Haycock doing?

Evidently Haycock's sense of smell had not improved supernaturally, for he took two steps in the wrong direction, away from the car, and let loose a guttural roar of rage that made Michael's heart leap painfully against his ribs.

Maybe he would just wander off...

Michael's gaze fell on Carl. His chest was still rising and falling, but weakly, irregularly. A bubble of blood escaped his lips, popping and running down over his cheek.

To wait it out was to sit and watch Carl die.

Michael shook his head.

He would have to hope that Haycock would fall for the same trick twice.

He popped open the glove compartment as silently as possible, and fished out a small book of local maps. All he had to do was open the car door quietly, and throw the book into the trees, away from the car and Carl, and then head in the opposite direction.

Once he was out of the car, all he had to do was remain silent, and slip away. Use the killer's blindness against him. He began to feel a little more confident.

Carl was off to the left of the car. If it were possible, Michael would tell his friend to hold on for his return as he passed him. He focused on the fallen man again, made sure he was still breathing. He was.

Michael turned back to the right, to the driver-side door, readying himself to lift the lock button as slowly and quietly as possible.

And screamed when he saw Haycock's bloodied face just millimetres away from the glass.

Michael leapt for the passenger door even as Haycock reared his head back before whipping it forward with a crunch into the glass. Cracks spread across the pane, but it held firm until the second blow.

Then it fell apart.

Haycock launched himself into the space, seemingly unaware of the shards that tore into his abdomen.

Michael grasped for the passenger door lock with sweat-drenched palms, feeling it slip in his grip, and then the door was open, and he dove out, pulling his knees toward him as he felt fingers grasping at his boot.

Michael was on his feet instantly, taking off toward Carl, throwing a look back over his shoulder at the car.

Haycock was caught awkwardly in the window, struggling to pull himself into the car, apparently unaware that the quicker option would be to withdraw and run around the vehicle.

Michael slowed as he approached his fallen partner, and knelt, keeping his gaze fixed firmly on the man thrashing in the police car.

"I'm going for help, Carl," he whispered. "I'll be back, stay quiet okay? He can't see you so just stay completely-"

Carl's eyes flew open, and Michael's mind went blank.

The whites of his partner's eyes were gone, replaced by a furious, livid crimson. The lids were stretched back, tearing, as the eyes seemed to swell to at least twice their normal size, seething in their sockets, looking like angry infections ready to burst.

With a cry, Michael stumbled back, away from his partner, Haycock temporarily forgotten. As he watched, mouth wide in horror, Michael saw his partner claw at his own bloodied face, tearing out the malignant tumours that had once provided his vision.

For a moment Michael was paralysed as his partner, thick blood oozing from the hole that Haycock's teeth had left in his neck, lifted himself to his knees. Only when Carl roared like a stricken animal and swung a hand violently through the empty space that Michael had filled just moments before, did the paralysis depart, taking with it all semblance of conscious thought.

Dimly aware of Haycock finally exiting the police car to the right, and Carl lurching to his feet behind him, Michael put his head down.

And ran.

*

When Rachel was ten she had become fascinated with the Olympic Games held in sweltering Atlanta. The time difference meant that often when she woke during the long, glorious summer without school, she would make her way downstairs, head full of possibilities for a day of freedom, and find herself greeted by the sound of her parents, sitting together in front of the television at 8am, cooing over the amazing feats of endurance or skill.

There was something unique about it. Maybe it was just her age; something to do with leaving the happy fog of childhood behind, or maybe it was the effect of seeing her parents so relaxed, happy and smiling, cheering on the country's athletes, instead of stressing about the day ahead. The chores that needed to be done, the bills that needed to be paid. For that one month, which seemed to stretch out endlessly before her, Rachel's house had the same wonderful, intangible feel as the small cottages or chalets her parents had always rented on the North Welsh coast for week-long holidays each June.

She hadn't ever paid much attention to sport before, whether on television or thrust in front of her face by eager PE teachers, and in truth, when that summer ebbed toward autumn, she never would again. By the time the next Olympics rolled around she was older if not necessarily wiser, and her head was dominated by thoughts of the boys in her class and fears that her body, somehow, was different to that of all the other girls, and they all knew it.

Still, for that one month, she became obsessed, devouring all the amazing events that took place under the baking Georgia sun, before rushing out to try to replicate them in her garden or the local park, staying out for as long as the remnants of the summer sun would allow, before hurrying home through the gloom in a vain attempt to avoid her mother's wrath at her staying out so late and arriving home long after dinner had cooled.

Her best friend at the time, Jeanette, had little interest in sport, and resisted Rachel's infectious enthusiasm for several days, but Rachel knew she was the leader out of the two, and she knew that eventually Jeanette would follow her. It wasn't long before Jeanette was rushing over to the Roberts house each morning and they would watch together, before devising how to go about recreating whichever event had caught their attention.

The feats of strength and speed were impressive, of course, and often got their young blood pumping; adrenaline coursing through them as their chosen favourite stumbled to a glorious victory or a noble defeat, but it was the gymnastics that truly entranced the two girls.

Watching the girls, barely older than they were, hailing from exotic-sounding places like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, as they twisted and contorted in a dazzling cascade of colourful ribbons; dancing across the screen with such poise and grace, the two girls instantly made their minds up: they would become gymnasts.

They immediately scurried out into the sunlight, practising handstands and rolls, twirling sticks tied at the end with string in place of ribbons, and squealed with glee when their motions reminded them of the otherworldly beauty they had seen on the TV.

It was only natural that once they had conquered throwing and catching the sticks and colourful string, Rachel would suggest that they needed to up the ante.

So it was that on one late morning in August, Rachel found herself clapping hands in delight as she watched her friend walking the high beam.

The wall they used wasn't quite narrow enough, of course, but it was high – maybe six feet off the ground – and dramatic enough that as Jeanette placed one foot confidently in front of the other, Rachel could almost hear the roar of the capacity crowd.

Jeanette beamed as she reached the end of the wall, her ten foot journey a raging success. She held her arms aloft, saluting the invisible crowd, accepting their rapturous cheers.

"Do a turn!" Rachel squealed, and Jeanette nodded.

It was as she turned, that brief moment where the difficulty curve suddenly shot up, where her balance was truly challenged, that it happened.

For a moment Rachel felt as though a small, manic laugh might escape her lips as she watched her friend fall from the wall into the neighbouring garden. But then she heard the crashing glass. And the scream.

When she climbed the boxes they had used as a makeshift ladder to get to the top of the wall and looked down at her friend, Rachel felt her head swim, and her stomach suddenly did not feel good at all.

Jeanette had fallen straight into the plate glass greenhouse belonging to the neighbours; the smashed shards tearing into her left leg near her hip, shearing it almost clean off.

The horror of the moment would stay with Rachel forever, the sickening twist of fate, the way the world turned upside down in an instant. The way a brilliant summer's day could suddenly feel so very cold.

There was so much blood, its metallic stench filling the air. Rachel screamed with her friend then, screamed until the neighbours and her father rushed into their gardens, their faces ashen as they saw little Jeanette torn apart in the wrecked greenhouse.

The ambulance came promptly, and the doctors were able to sew the decimated leg back together. Jeanette, it turned out, would be fine. She limped for a while, and heights would make her uneasy for the rest of her days, but the physical damage was not as calamitous as it appeared.

For Rachel though, things were never quite the same. She didn't speak much to Jeanette after that, and they slowly drifted apart, occasionally crossing paths in high school, their meetings marked by embittered stares and simmering anger that they didn't truly understand, and could never overcome.

If anyone were to ask Rachel – and as a teenager rebelling more than most, they often did – what it was that caused her violent, rage-filled outbursts, she would struggle to put it into words, but the image of that day would always float across her mind. That bright August morning was the moment her childhood really died, the moment at which, on some subconscious level, she began to understand that life is like a fire: comforting, warming, nurturing, and ready to burn the instant you let your attention drift.

All of those deeply buried emotions raced to the surface and delivered a sucker punch as Rachel looked at the pool of blood on the floor: the smear that led to her parents' basement. A blow hard enough to knock the air clean out of her, leaving her gasping; her vision blurred by hot tears.

The blood belonged to her father. She knew it instinctively, and felt a small pang of fearful shame as she acknowledged to herself that she hoped she was wrong, and that whatever misfortune had happened in the kitchen, it had befallen her mother instead.

The knots in her stomach told a different story.

The basement.

Her eyes fixed on the door, on the bloody hand print that adorned it like a Christmas decoration from hell. The long, glistening smear of blood that led to it.

Someone had been hurt, and had dragged themselves into the basement. Rachel knew that she should be thinking about the why of it: the obvious implications of an injured person retreating into a dark prison, rather than seeking out help, but for now all she could think was that it was Daddy's blood, and that there was a slim chance that he might still be alive.

Hands trembling, she stepped carefully over the blood and reached for the handle of the basement door. The metal felt cool and familiar in her hands, and memories of all the times she had walked down the narrow stairs in the past, helping her mother with the laundry, flooded back into her mind, jarring her with their familiarity in the suddenly alien and hostile environment.

For a moment she held the handle and stood still, head cocked slightly, straining to hear something beyond the door, hoping that she might hear her father's voice perhaps, calling faintly for help. Terror built up inside her, the fear at what she might see upon opening the door waging a silent war against her belief that her father was down there, injured, maybe dying.

She threw the door open and found herself confronted by a black hole, as though the bright kitchen had opened a hungry mouth, ready to swallow her whole. The light from the kitchen illuminated a handful of bare concrete steps leading down, disappearing into impenetrable gloom.

And now she could hear something. Soft, wet sounds. Sounds that could only be her stricken father struggling in the darkness, the liquid of his life spilling out onto the cold, hard floor.

Rachel rushed forward blindly then, filled equally with fear and hope and desperation, clumsily and frantically traversing the steps into the basement, into the blackness.

It was the smell that hit her first. The basement air was musty and old, sour smelling. And filled with another scent, something that took her all the way back to that summer's day and the smashed greenhouse, and the screaming: the cloying, coppery stench of blood.

Then, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and the source of the strange wet sounds was revealed, Rachel felt something snapping in her mind, some important tether suddenly breaking.

Rachel's first instinct had been right: it was her father in the basement, lying prone on the concrete, but he was not alone. Crouched over his fallen, lifeless body was the family's beloved friendly little terrier, Sniffer, his snout drenched in gore.

Eating her father's face.

She had a moment to take in the insanity, to feel it penetrate her brain and put down roots. A second in which to see the dog lift its head in her direction, to notice that there was something wrong with its eyes, something that the gloom of the basement would not quite reveal.

A second to stumble backwards as Sniffer came for her, blood-soaked lips pulled back, snarling.

*

Michael hit the tarmac hard, putting his head down to the wind. Travelling.

He had been a decent runner in school, not quite with that extra burst of speed that the select few of his peers that ended up running for the county had, but they would have been able to see him in their rear view mirror. A few years of little real exercise hadn't quite eradicated that prowess, and as he pumped his legs, feet smashing painfully into the road, he felt a certain confidence.

The two horrors from the car park were following. He could hear the crashing feet and broken panting. For a moment he found himself questioning how they were able to target him so effectively – clearly they were blind, yet they were not aimless. Again he wondered if they were operating by smell, but the notion seemed ridiculous. These were human beings, not bloodhounds.

He risked a look back over his left shoulder, and almost yelled out when he saw how close they were. The fog permitted visibility of fifteen feet, twenty at most but Michael could see them clearly. Coming fast. And once again he noticed the strange, alien gait, the movement that seemed to belong more to the animal kingdom than the human world.

He doubled his efforts, but already his heart was sinking. The air pumping through his lungs felt as though it were getting hotter, each new breath seemed to be filled with razors that rattled around painfully in his chest. He wasn't going to be able to keep this up. They were going to catch him.

Michael made up his mind before he even realised there was an issue up for debate. The road offered him a clear path, a place to use his pace to its fullest, but it also made him a sitting duck, a target that could not be missed. What the road offered most was vulnerability.

He veered off the tarmac and into the woods.

As he crashed into the undergrowth, aware that he was making more noise but also hoping that the more difficult terrain would prove too much for his sightless pursuers, he was surprised to find his mind filled with thoughts of his estranged wife, of the way the marriage hadn't so much broken down as melted away. Each day a steady diminishing, until one day, when you found yourself looking, you discovered there was nothing left to see.

Things had been good with Elise, really good for a long time. She taught kids at the local primary school. She smiled whenever she saw him. She sang in the kitchen, little improvised verses that usually swerved into ridiculous territory and always made them both laugh.

Even now, his heart ached as he thought about the way that smile had slowly disappeared, to be replaced one day with curt pleasantries, and finally with a stiff goodbye. The way he had known deep down that she hadn't wanted to say that terrible word, that she hoped day after day that the man she had met would return. The way, in the end, she felt she had to.

They had moved quickly in the beginning, getting a place together only a few months after they met, in clichéd fashion, following a chance meeting of their gaze across a smoky bar in the Cardiff City centre. Marriage followed within a couple of years and a year later than that, while the glow of the honeymoon period still emitted a failing sliver of light, Elise had announced to him that she was pregnant.

Michael felt it at the time, the dark realisation that having a baby was like papering over the cracks in shifting continents, but he always held out hope that one day something would click, some mysterious unseen machine would shift gears and the smile would return. Yet continents shift, and can not be stopped.

The baby, their daughter, Claire, arrived like the word of God. A miracle that renewed their faith and promised a bright future. She meant everything to him, his heart swelling until it felt like it might burst every time he looked at her. For a time, things felt good again, but still, deep down, Michael knew. Knew that both he and Elise had become actors, playing roles. Saying the right things, doing the right things. But the actions were hollow, and there was no echo of them in their eyes.

Eventually the script just...ran out, and there was nothing left to say, no way to improvise happiness.

Elise finally left, taking Claire with her, returning to her parents' home in Aberystwyth. It was a hundred miles, the distance between them. A hundred miles and a lifetime.

Claire was six when Elise had left, eight and-a-half now, and her continued absence hurt like a tumour, growing with each passing day and eating into him. He saw her some weekends, bitter tears stinging his eyes every time he had to leave her with her mother, but the long, irregular hours he had to work, the main reason, he guessed, for his wife's muted rage toward him, quickly began to work their dark spell on his relationship with Claire, and he felt it too begin to ebb away.

He had to let her down all too often.

That was the reason he had moved to St. Davids, or at least it was the reason he gave when his superiors questioned his transfer request. It was nothing to do with...the other thing. He just needed to be closer to his daughter, and to work on a Force that wasn't so demanding of his time and energy.

The intervening years saw resentment toward Elise build, naturally. She had become little more than the woman who had taken his child away from him, and whenever he thought about her now, it was usually with anger. When he confronted her, each time he arrived to take Claire away for a weekend or a day trip, their discussions were cordial but functional, a fractured mirror of the final months of their union.

Crashing through the woods, chased by two blood-soaked figures from a fevered nightmare, Michael was surprised to find that it was her face that preoccupied him. It was her, he realised suddenly, that he was running to. All the unmentioned tensions that had built up between them, all the uncommunicated issues, were now so much bullshit. Trivial nonsense that did not have to sit in his gut, boiling away in unnecessary anger. If he could only talk to her again, just one more time, he knew now that he could see that smile once more.

Behind him, it sounded like the roots and bushes were slowing the two predators down; the volume of their crashing passage slowly receding. Michael slowed his pace a little, anxious that he should not stumble over some obstacle and end up dying of a twisted ankle, and pressed on further into the thickening forest.

*

The dog came fast, pouncing toward her, and Rachel had time to notice his teeth, suddenly sharp. Wicked-looking. Were they always that sharp?

He had always had those teeth, those reminders that in another life Sniffer would have been part of a large pack, roaming plains and savagely bringing down larger animals to satisfy their thirst for blood.

Panicked, she took a step backwards, stumbling over the small toolbox that Dad always kept at the foot of the stairs, and hitting the ground, hard. The air rushed out of her, even as Sniffer, his anticipated target now a vacuum, crashed into the shelves lined against the wall, decorated with the junk of an average life.

Rachel saw the shelves begin to topple toward her, and knew instinctively that allowing them to land on her would mean her death. She rolled to one side as the shelves creaked and leaned, finally giving in to gravity's persuasion and crashing onto the floor inches from her left leg.

A noise, half squeal-half growl, told her that Sniffer had not been quite so lucky.

Rachel scrabbled away on all fours and leapt to her feet, coughing out the foul-tasting dust that had no doubt been accumulating on the shelves for years, if not decades.

She half expected to be hit in the back by the wild dog as she stood, but the impact never came. Snatching up the nearest object she could see, a socket wrench sitting atop the ancient washing machine, Rachel turned to face the dog that she had spent her teenage years cuddling and playing with, ready to kill it.

And saw immediately that there was no need.

The jumble of trash that had fallen from the shelves had brought with it a rusted pitchfork hanging from a makeshift hook on the wall. A pitchfork that was now embedded deep into Sniffer's shoulders.

For several seconds Rachel watched open-mouthed as the tiny terrier struggled toward her on its belly, wheezing and growling weakly, desperately trying to free itself from the wreckage. Incredibly, the dog still seemed to be focused purely on reaching Rachel.

Sniffer's eyes never left her, two dark unending pools that, even in the half-light, she could see were ringed in dark blood, flowing freely from the dog's tear ducts. She was still staring into those fearful eyes when Sniffer finally wheezed for the last time and fell silent.

Dead silence in the basement.

She turned to the ruined remains of Jim Roberts then, still nursing a faint, forlorn hope that there might be some life left in him. Hope that fled when she saw the reality: her father's throat had been ripped away, and he had two deep gashes on his abdomen. Little remained of his obliterated face, and the eyes that always seemed to twinkle when he looked at his beloved daughter were gone; eaten away by the family dog.

Rachel thought then of the hug that she had been waiting to receive when her train pulled into St. Davids station just an hour or two earlier, the one that she would now never receive, and of the twinkling delight in her father's eyes that summer all those years before when she cuddled him on the sofa in the bright morning sun that poured through the window, strong hands squeezing her narrow shoulders, asking him to explain how the Olympics worked, and her eyes filled with tears.

Her father was gone.

She wept, her palms pressed tightly against wet cheeks, and allowed the shock and the grief to sweep her up in its hard, unforgiving embrace. She cried forcefully then, choking out painful sobs, feeling them torn from her lungs by the catastrophic morning.

Lost in her grief, Rachel almost didn't hear it.

Almost.

A thump, in one of the rooms above her head.

Someone else was in the house.

*

They've finally found me, Victor thought to himself as he watched the police officer moving stealthily through the trees on one of the bank of CCTV monitors that dominated the small strongroom. The small black and white image was fuzzy, but unmistakeable. Odd that they would send in uniformed police, though. He had expected SWAT at the very least, if not military.

The surprise he felt at seeing the man creeping through the trees toward the small surface building that served as little more than an entrance to the safehouse was unexpected.  After all, he had been prepared for discovery, and Victor was a man who prepared thoroughly. Discreet motion-sensitive cameras had been installed in trees covering a half-mile radius around his property, along with remotely controlled explosive charges, tripwires and mines that would kill or maim anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves within the blast radius, and which were certainly loud and plentiful enough to give pause to anyone thinking about a direct attack. Both counter measures offered plenty of time for Victor to assess his options, of which there were two; the same two that were left to any cornered animal: fight or flight.

His home was a fortress, and there were defensive weapons he could operate without ever surfacing, but the fact of the matter was that if the organisation had done its homework properly they would come in force, and Victor was just one man.

And the truth of it was that Victor was no fighter. If it all came down to a physical battle then the war was already lost. He was under no illusions about that. No, the scale-model fortress and the cloak of invisibility he thought he'd thrown over himself was Victor's hand, and he had already played it.

Slowing the attackers down would give him enough time to get to the fourth subterranean level of the building; to the escape route that led to a tiny cave on the coastline a few hundred yards distant, barely visible from all but one oblique angle. The cave opened to a miniscule beach that was home to a small boat which would get him across the channel to Ireland, from where a phone call to a man who owed him an enormous favour could get Victor a flight to anywhere on the planet.

Australia, maybe. Victor had always liked the sound of Australia. One of the few places in the world that was inhabited and civilised, yet simultaneously wild. A land of dangerous predators. A place to call home.

The surprise Victor felt at seeing the approaching cop was, he guessed, more to do with the timing of it.

He had expected to be found at the start. Hell, he had expected that his building of this place over a period of two years under their damn noses would have left some trace, some loose end that the investigators would pick up and slowly wind in despite all the care he had taken to make his visits to South Wales, and the money spent on building a military-style complex in the forest as untraceable as possible.

Still, actions caused ripples on the surface of the world, no matter how small they were, or how stealthy their intent. Ripples that might go unnoticed, but not if an experienced fisherman was searching for them.

During those first few months, he had maintained a state of high alert. Defcon fucking One, at all hours of the day, certain that they knew where he was, and were coming for him. As the weeks dragged on he told himself that the delay was simply down to them plotting out their strategy. When the weeks became months, and the paranoia kicked in, driven on by his life of absolute isolation, Victor told himself that their waiting game was simply a ruse. They were waiting for him to lower his guard. Toying with him. He raged impotently.

Finally, when a year had passed, he began to relax, and to believe that maybe, just maybe, he had gotten away clean, and all their searching had yielded no lead. He allowed himself a night of celebration, chugging his way through two dusty bottles of wine, congratulating himself on his ingenuity. He knew the way they thought, knew that they would expect him to have made his way to another country. Right now they were probably wasting time and money trawling through non-extradition slums in the far-flung corners of the globe, while their quarry hid in their very own cellar.

Victor had maintained a strict observance of security, of course, for he knew that people who try to hide from anything are usually caught through their own carelessness. His systems were kept up to date and well-maintained, his vigilance never truly abated.

On the very rare occasions that he had to leave the safehouse for supplies, he did so using the boat, under cover of darkness, and travelled to Ireland, where he paid in cash for whatever he required. It was a chore of course, to travel by sea for three hours just stock up on canned food when there were perfectly good convenience stores a couple of hours' walk away, but Victor would be damned if he would give away his position through laziness.

Everything had gone according to plan, months became years and Victor lived on, the internet and a stray cat his only company.

He frowned at the CCTV screen. So why now, after eight long years, was a policeman moving stealthily toward him?

Victor cycled through the other cameras, finding nothing of interest. The situation made no sense. Of course, the man must be a decoy – it was clear his attempts at stealth were clumsy and ineffectual; an obvious act that Victor felt insulted his intelligence somewhat. Had they forgotten who they were dealing with?

No, the attack would come from the North, that was obvious, but none of the cameras were picking up anything at all.

Victor flicked back to the steady line of cameras that picked up the man's movement, handing his passage to the next like a relay race baton, and stared at him thoughtfully. It was, of course, possible, that this man had no idea where he was, or that every step he took now might be his last; that his life could be extinguished at the touch of a button.

Indecision shuddered in Victor's mind, an uncomfortable sensation for a man who had spent his life making decisions and sticking by them, no matter the cost. To reveal himself by blowing this beat-walker up, panicking and overreacting at a mere moment of chance, would be a loss of discipline that Victor could never forgive.

On the screen, the policeman picked his way across tangles of roots, navigating the uneven ground with the utmost care, blissfully unaware. Victor watched him intently. A decision made in the dark was always a poor gamble.

He needed to know more.

*

Michael had finally lost them, and allowed himself a short moment of self-congratulation, alongside a powerful rush of relief.

His survival instincts had proven trustworthy: Carl and Haycock had steadily lagged behind once the forest became denser, and movement became a matter of picking a careful path through bushes and fallen branches. He had heard their ragged panting grow steadily dimmer as he pushed through the trees until the sound disappeared altogether.

When finally he heard a roar of primal rage that chilled the blood in his veins more than the freezing air ever could, and realised that his pursuers must be at least half a mile behind him, Michael began to finally relax his tensed muscles, almost gasping at the pain that accompanied the realisation that he had been clenching everything so tightly that it burned upon release.

He began to move more slowly then, making sure he made as little noise as possible. Sound seemed to carry easily through the mist, and he was certain that any noise he made loudly enough to reveal his location would draw them to it like a homing beacon.

He was grateful to be able to slow down, not just to spare the agony that had erupted in his calves and thighs an eternity ago, but also because the less rapid movement gave him a chance to avoid the low branches that had whipped him as he ran, leaving painful scratches and welts on his bare skin. Under his uniform, Michael's body was already beginning to protest at the sudden imposition of countless bruises.

Michael had no great love for the countryside, never had really. He had chosen St. Davids because it was quiet, and because it was the closest position to his estranged family that the Force had been able to offer him. Both of these plus points proved to be as advertised – if anything the miniature city was too quiet, and the day-to-day business of being on the beat proved stupefyingly dull.

The downside was that the place positively reeked of countryside. The town itself looked like the best way to travel to it was probably by time machine – and once you got beyond the borders of the town proper, there was little of note beyond trees and coastline in any direction for twenty miles other than the occasional cluster of ancient farm buildings.

For a guy who had grown up in the hustle and bustle of Cardiff, a city and port undergoing something of a boom period, bristling with renovation and new trends, the lack of technology and concrete constructions was jarring.

Michael enjoyed the survivalist TV shows, watching over-enthusiastic men setting out to tame the wildest parts of the planet single-handed and with little more than a rucksack to their name, but he never at any point felt the call of the wild that other people sometimes spoke of wistfully.

When people spoke about modern life missing a vital connection to nature, his mind simply went blank.

That was down to his father, he believed, to the infrequent and impromptu camping trips to the wilderness that had pockmarked his childhood. The trouble, it turned out, with a camping expedition led by a manic depressive was that the build up promised glorious days of excitement and adventure, yet the reality proved to be excruciating hours trapped in a rain-soaked tent with a dangerously sullen and temperamental beast. Permanently on-edge. Those trips were like living on the slopes of an active volcano. Not a case of if disaster would strike, but when.

He was grateful for the countryside now though, grateful for the cover it provided, even as his thoughts already turned to the very real possibility that he was hopelessly lost. He paused, breathing heavily, and squinted toward the treetops, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sky and gauge the direction of town from the sun. No such luck: the mist – thickening, it seemed – blocked out the sky, filtering through only a cold, unwelcoming light.

Michael grimaced, and pulled out his phone. As expected, the no signal symbol still mocked his attempts to communicate with the world.

His best bet, he figured, was to get to higher ground, and hope that the mist would thin out enough to offer him some sort of information about his location. Good old Bear Grylls. At least some of the advice on that TV show had sunk in, even if Michael didn't want to think about being out here long enough to get hungry, and find himself forced to resort to the sort of horrific meals the cheery presenter routinely choked down.

He set off again, keeping his eyes out for a large tree that might prove to be an easy climb.

The sudden clearing startled him, and the sight of the low, flat concrete building, looking for all the world like some nondescript military installation surprised him even more.

Neither though, proved to be as shocking as the butt of the gun that suddenly swung from behind a tree trunk immediately to his right, smashing into his jaw and sending the world black.

# Chapter 5

Panic buried dagger-sharp talons into Rachel's mind, and began to slowly twist. She was reminded of a school trip she had taken aged fourteen or so to the theme park Alton Towers, of the all-consuming terror she had felt on that first rollercoaster as it crested an incline after the long, tense journey to the top. Of the way she had felt so powerless, that she was being dragged towards something so fearful it made her bladder loosen and her hands tremble, with no way to stop the forward momentum.

The difference was that here, it was her mind getting dragged along by some invisible, omnipotent force.

When another soft thump sounded in one of the rooms above the basement, she came close to screaming, fearing that once she started she might never stop, as though sanity was a precipice on which she now teetered, one slip away from tumbling forever into the ravenous dark.

In the end, it was perhaps only the confusion of the morning's events that pulled her away from the brink. Or maybe it was the growing rage. Already her mind was turning over of its own accord, and throwing up questions to which there was no ready answer. Could Sniffer, a small dog weighing no more than twelve pounds really have killed her father? Jim Roberts was not a small man. Not exactly a fit and strong man – thirty years working in a bakery had seen to that, the odd nibble here, the occasional tasting there; all adding up over the years.

Dad would have collapsed wheezing at the very thought of having to run anywhere, she thought, but he was a solid block of a man, six foot plus and strong as an ox. The dog would surely have been swatted away like a fly.

No, Sniffer had been driven crazy by something, that was obvious, but bringing down a man who weighed probably twenty times more than him just didn't add up. Sniffer had to be the vulture, feasting on the dying or the dead. Which meant whoever or whatever had killed Jim Roberts was elsewhere.

Thump.

Elsewhere in the house.

Rachel still clutched the socket wrench in white-knuckled fingers. Probably she should have searched the basement for something better to defend herself, something with a cutting edge. But her thoughts had become as foggy as the town's streets, her mind slowly filling with blinding anger. She had a pretty good swing on her. The wrench would do.

She turned to face the stairs. At the summit, the door to the basement had swung almost closed, but a gap remained, letting in cool, grey light.

She moved slowly, trying to remember from her descent whether there was anything on the stairs that might trip her, or that she might stumble across and alert whoever was in the house to her approach.

In her mind she saw something mirroring her actions, creeping slowly toward the other side of the door, drawn by the commotion her fight with the dog had caused. She wondered whether it too had a weapon, something that dwarfed the potential of her wrench. Something that had torn open the stomach of her father.

Gripping the wrench, the cold, hard metal against her sweating palm feeding her courage, she reached the door and stopped, listening intently.

She heard a click, something she couldn't identify. It sounded like it came from the entrance to the kitchen.

Rachel grimaced, and charged out into the light, her right arm already swinging as she dashed into the kitchen. A hulking, enormous figure stood in the doorway, head bent, staring at something in his hands.

Rachel's mind pieced together the information too slowly to stop. It came in fragments, glimpses of the facts, like a stop motion animation running at half-speed.

Jason, her brother. Checking his mobile phone. Looking up, startled, eyes wide in shock at seeing his sister, hands and chest covered in blood, rushing toward him, swinging.

Hitting the ground hard as the wrench connected with his temple with a dull thud.

"Oh my God!" Rachel cried out as she watched her giant little brother fall to the floor, felled like an oak. "Jason! Are you okay? Oh, please be okay, please..."

She dropped to the tiled floor beside him, leaning over his chest and searching his face. Jason lay flat on his back, blinking at the ceiling. From the expression on his face, it was surprise more than pain that had dropped him.

"Hey, Sis," he grunted, sounding bewildered. "Nice wrench. I'm afraid I only got you some chocolates."

Rachel smiled despite herself. It was so good to hear Jason voice, to hear anything normal on the morning from hell. She half laughed, then burst into tears, wild, heaving sobs that tore through her, making her shake uncontrollably.

Jason levered himself upright and looked at her, mystified.

"Sis? Rach? What's wrong?"

Rachel threw her arms around him, feeling him tense for a second and then relax, and buried her face into his shoulder.

"He's dead, Jase," she gasped between sobs, feeling his T-shirt grow quickly damp as she wept.

"Dad's dead."

*

Michael dreamed of betrayal. The dream was nothing new. It coiled around his consciousness, embracing him like an old friend. The words it whispered to him were steeped in familiarity, and each time the pain of them grew, filling the dark chasm in his soul. The places changed, the faces differed, but the unmistakeable message remained the same: the people you trust will hurt you.

For a while after The Cardiff Incident, Michael had been obliged to attend sessions with a therapist, an elderly woman by the name of Susan.

Susan had a nice smile and a kindly manner, and it was possible to forget, listening to her softly-spoken tones, that she was a healthcare professional at all. The ease of the conversation, the familial nature of their 'little chats' – like Susan was the grandmother Michael had lost years before – was impressive.

The illusion never quite drew Michael in, since he spent a good deal of time wondering how long Susan had studied in order to develop those subtle skills, but he appreciated the effort, and the 'little chats' were a pleasant enough way to spend an hour.

Never felt like he learned much though. He went into therapy with a preconceived notion that he would be unravelling riddles in his psyche that he hadn't even known had existed. That each session would bring some Eureka moment; a sudden revelation of the self that would feel like the lifting of a lifelong burden so intrinsic he hadn't even known he had been carrying it.

Nothing of the sort ever happened, and Michael wondered if somehow his cynicism had sullied the process and denied himself the epiphany. Susan had gently coerced him into talking about his childhood, about his relationship with his parents, his lifelong battle to keep the depression that had claimed his father at bay, the increasingly strained relationship with Elise, the stress of the job. All factors, she said, that had led understandably – perhaps inevitably – to The Cardiff Incident. The dreams, of course, stemmed from his mother's departure, and the years he had spent being raised by a man preoccupied with fighting his own legion of demons. Textbook.

Michael had smiled and nodded, and eventually even began to play out a role as a man astonished to discover such revelatory information. A man ready to begin a life of positive action and self-fulfilment.

In the end, during those last couple of sessions, he felt that he consciously led the conversation to places that would appease Susan; places that would allow her to tick the boxes on whatever forms she would need to fill out to release him, satisfied that she had done her job. He delivered an approximation of a Eureka moment in the end, mainly for Susan's benefit, and so he could bring the sessions to a close.

It struck Michael that her failure to uncover his obvious deception meant that he was either a very good actor, which he doubted, hearing the falsehoods that slipped from his own mouth; or that Susan, and by extension her entire profession, was a charlatan.

Sometimes, in his darker moments in the years since those sessions finished, he wondered if maybe Susan had known all along, and was as glad for their sessions to end as he was. Maybe Michael was too lost even for therapy to bring him back.

He had returned to work cleared for active duty, and still broken.

And still the dreams stalked him. When it wasn't betrayal it was something far worse:  The corridor. The blood. The screaming. He had become used to waking from the terrors of sleep now, rarely troubled by the shakes and sweats that had often accompanied turbulent nights at the start. Nightmares had become routine.

Waking to find a shotgun levelled at his face, however...that was new.

It was the pain that hit Michael first, even before he opened his eyes, the insistent pounding in his head that felt like some mighty blacksmith had taken up residence within and was using his brain as an anvil. He opened his mouth to groan and another pain clamoured for his attention: the right side of his jaw felt like it had been dipped in molten metal.

And finally, a third pain. Far less crippling than the first two, yet at the same time far more troubling: a burning ache that started at his wrists and ran up to his shoulders.

Michael was tied to something, something large and cold; something that scratched at his wrists when he tried to move them.

He sat for a moment or two, keeping his head bowed, hoping that his captor had not noticed him stirring, straining his ears to pick up any sort of clue about the situation that might swing things in his favour. All he heard was distant birdsong, sounding strangely animated, almost hysterical, as though the bird in question had just spotted a cat sneaking up on it; and leaves rustling in a faint wind.

Finally, he opened his eyes, letting painful light rush in. That's when he saw the gun.

Things swam sharply into focus. Michael was still in the forest, though the last thing he'd remembered before being knocked unconscious – the strange, squat building in the clearing – was nowhere to be seen. His arms were tied behind the trunk of a tree, which explained the pain in his shoulders, his tendons straining to accommodate the awkward angle of his arms.

A few feet away, sitting on a stump, was a small figure dressed in black, face obscured by a hood pulled low, looking for all the world like the grim reaper with an updated arsenal.

The man holding the shotgun was slight, and his clothes looked a size too large for him, as though he hadn't bought anything new in years, or was unaware that he had dropped a few pounds.

Michael coughed, tasting blood and feeling a couple of broken teeth wobbling in his gums, and tried unsuccessfully to find the man's eyes in the dark space under the hood.

The figure did not move for a long time, save for the slight motion of his gloved fingers, which turned over a small pebble with surprising dexterity.

It was Michael that spoke first.

"Who are you? What do you want with me?"

He had aimed for an authoritative tone, but was disappointed to find he had missed. Fear was clearly evident in his voice, amplified by the eerie calm of his captor, who simply sat, almost nonchalantly regarding him from the depths of the hood.

"Look," Michael continued. "Whoever you are, whatever you've done, we can talk about it okay? What you're doing here will only make things worse. So why don't you put down the-"

The hooded man flicked his wrist and Michael was silenced by the pebble he had been toying with catching him flush in the centre of his forehead. An infant pain; a squalling new member of the family.

"You like movies, Officer?"

Michael remained silent. The hooded man's voice was off somehow: guttural, forced, as though he was growling through his teeth, trying to disguise it. Michael thought he could detect faint echoes of an accent, though he couldn't place it.

"Sure you do. Who doesn't like movies right? I watch a lot of movies. Modern day parables: little bite size lessons on how we should react to almost any circumstance. You know that 95% of people, if they find themselves in a dangerous and unfamiliar situation, will be subconsciously scanning through their memory banks, trying to remember what Will Smith or Jean Claude Van Damme would do? Tragic, really, but understandable. These days, our field of experience is very narrow you see, very sanitised.

"Tell me, Officer. I'm sure you've seen lots of movies, lots of cop movies, right? Justice catching up with the bad guys, big cheer, lights go up.

"Have you ever seen a movie in which the guy tied to the tree asks the questions?"

Michael shook his head slowly. Jesus, he thought, the guy's a lunatic.

"That's right," the hooded man said. The tone of his voice shifted a little, and Michael thought he could hear the man smiling smugly.

"I will take your silence to mean that you are a quick learner, and that is very good. Because, Officer, this is not a movie, and there is no convenient sharp rock for you to cut through those bonds with. There are real bullets in this gun, and I am fully prepared to use them. Will Smith is not coming to save you. All of which means I ask the questions and you answer them, yes?"

Michael nodded.

"Very good."

There it was again, the trace of an accent. Wery Gut. Eastern Europe? Germany, maybe?

"So, Officer. Why are you here?"

Michael searched his mind for some plausible reason, something that would mollify the crazy man with the gun, but came up empty. He felt like he had wandered into the middle of an argument that he knew nothing about and was asked to pick a side, when both factions seemed dangerous.

"Look, I'm a police officer and-"

With power that belied his slight frame, the hooded man struck like a snake, lashing out a hand, scooping up another rock – bigger this time – and whipping it against Michael's forehead. Again, he proved unerringly accurate.

Michael's skull rang dully, like a muted bell. He suddenly felt nauseated, and wondered passively if he was suffering from concussion, and whether it would even matter if the hooded man was intent on hurling increasingly larger rocks at him.

"I know what you are, Officer. I did not ask you what you are. I did not ask you who you are. Pay careful attention to the words I am using: why are you here?"

Michael was dismayed to find himself stammering.

"I...I don't know what you want from me, I don't even know where 'here' is, for Christ's sake!"

The man said nothing for several seconds, and then hefted the shotgun, taking aim.

Michael squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and saw, briefly, an image of his estranged wife and child standing before him. He felt a warmth return to him, something that had been missing for so long that even its absence had been forgotten, and then the deafening roar of the shotgun enveloped him.

*

Jason Roberts was a giant.

He had always been tall: a growth spurt that began aged ten, and which his teachers joked never seemed to actually stop, seeing him tower over his classmates. By the age of sixteen he stood six feet and five inches and finally gravity decided it had had enough and called a halt.

In response, his body merely decided that it would grow horizontally.

If he had been American, he would no doubt have had college football coaches swarming all over him, but the truth was that in St. Davids his size merely made him unusual.

He played for the school rugby team, of course, and though he didn't possess much in the way of actual talent, he quickly made a name for himself across the county by virtue of his size and strength. His kicking, catching and running were all sub-par, but he was a one-man scrum, and his team mates loved nothing more than seeing a team from another school visit for the first time and watch their faces go white when they saw they were lining up against Voorhees.

That's what they called him. Voorhees. After the hulking monster – also called Jason – in all those dumb horror movies. Jason watched a couple, but they were truly ridiculous, full of stupid teens running away from a guy in a mask who always seemed to catch them despite never moving quicker than a man out for a leisurely stroll.

He didn't mind the name at first; found it kind of funny really – and for a while all his mates loved those movies, sneaking hold of copies on DVD and watching them without their parents knowing. It made him feel a bit like a hero, he supposed, until everyone grew out of it, but the truth was that the name could hardly be less apt.

Jason was a behemoth, but he didn't have an aggressive bone in his body. In fact, his size - the way it made him stand out in a crowd - just made him feel self-conscious and embarrassed. He spent most of those teenage years, when he stood almost a foot taller than his peers, wishing on a nightly basis that he would just stop growing.

Most of the time he slouched, trying to shave off a couple of inches, and he became quiet and distant. Previously an outgoing, happy child, he became a teenager that wanted nothing more than to fade into the background.

Girls made things worse.

Jason remained oblivious for a long time, and when finally he did develop an interest, he found girls terrifying. He had no idea that half the female population of the school nursed a secret crush on him, nor that he intimidated them. All he understood was that occasionally he would catch a girl staring at him, and when he made eye contact they would quickly look away or begin to giggle with their friends. He was, it was obvious, a freak. Voorhees.

It wasn't long before the boys who had originally been in awe of Jason, and terrified of his size, realised just how fragile he was, and how easily led.

To an outsider, the notion of this giant being bullied by kids that he dwarfed would have seemed preposterous, but Jason's mental maturity lagged way behind his physical. Maybe it was because he was so embarrassed about standing out; maybe it was just karma, some form of cosmic balance that denied him the awareness to understand the mind games and cruelty that form a large part of high school, and to leverage the power he did not know that he held.

He found himself in trouble often, his attempts to fit in leading to his hanging out with the kind of kids who sniff out weakness like bloodhounds. Nothing major - after all, this was still St. Davids - but whether it was getting caught smoking by the teachers, or shoplifting, or dabbling in drink and drugs, Jason always seemed to end up involved.

It was Rachel who was the strong one, always had been, and Jason understood that even as his biceps began to bulge and his neck thickened.

Two years Jason's senior, Rachel manoeuvred her way through secondary school with a clear mind and enviable focus. Jason's sister was determined, single-minded, and had balls of steel. When one lunchtime she found Jason on the verge of tears, being mercilessly tormented about girls by a group of his so-called friends, cruel guys who knew the gentle giant would never respond in the only way they would respect, Rachel waded in, slapping one guy so hard Jason thought it sounded like a gunshot ringing out across the yard, and then delivering a solid knee to the testicles of the smirking ringleader.

"Who's afraid of girls now, bastard?"

He remembered the diamond-hard edge to her voice as she spoke those words often, the way her jaw jutted out, challenging the bully to get back to his feet, showing no fear whatsoever, and it always made him smile.

They became closer that day, the day that Rachel realised that her little brother needed protecting despite his physique, and he leant on her a lot over the next few years. Even when he grew into himself a little, leaving school and starting a decent career in construction, he'd call or text her most days, and when he sought advice or reassurance or validation, she always provided it.

Rachel was a pillar of Jason's life.

Looking at his sister now, sitting on the tiled floor, covered in blood and crying, damn near hysteria, Jason felt that pillar crumble a little, as though someone had pulled back some great curtain to reveal that the world he knew was just some illusion, some software being played out on a vast computer.

"Dad's dead."

He understood the words, but they made no sense to him. Dad's dead. Dad's. Dead.

He shook his head a little, as though it needed rebooting.

Their father couldn't possibly be dead. Jason had driven down this morning to celebrate his dad's birthday. There was a cake. Jason had bought a funny card, one that said I wanted to buy you a Ferrari on the front and then when you opened it up you found one of those packs of tiny screwdrivers that you get in Christmas crackers and the words but I could only afford the tool kit.

It was funny. Jason knew dad would find it funny, and he had driven there that morning thinking about how his dad would roar with laughter when he saw it, looking forward to him clapping Jason on the shoulder and grinning broadly.

How could Dad be dead?

He rubbed his head, feeling a small bump forming at the edge of his hairline where Rachel had pounded him with the wrench. She must have hit me harder than I thought. Sounded like she said Dad's dead.

"I don't understand," Jason said. "Where's Dad? Where's Mum? Is that blood?"

Rachel sobbed, and nodded, and Jason felt his stomach drop like an elevator.

*

A storm of shredded bark whirled around Michael's head, falling softly on his hair and face like dry snow. He breathed in, feeling the dust coat the inside of his mouth and throat, and coughed painfully.

He'd felt the impact of the shotgun blast, though not as he had expected. Instead of the shredding of muscle and flesh, it felt more like a hammer blow, vibrating through his back. The hooded man had aimed high, blasting the trunk of the tree that Michael was tied to.

A warning shot.

"Let's try that again, Officer, and remember that I have a fondness for fast learners. Why are you here?"

Michael coughed again, working saliva around his mouth, clearing out the dust.

"You shouldn't have done that."

"Oh?"

The hooded man sounded amused.

"They'll be coming."

The hooded man's voice dropped to a sibilant whisper.

"Who will be coming?"

Michael drew in a deep breath, and took the only option he had. The truth.

"I am here because I was running for my life. From two men I have known for years, one of whom I would have trusted with my daughter's life until this morning. Two men who ripped out their own eyes and began killing people with their teeth. I ran from them, I ended up here. The end."

The gun lowered, just a fraction.

"How were they chasing you if they had no eyes?"

"They move like animals. Seem to navigate by sound. They weren't that far behind me, half a mile or so I'd guess. That little show you just put on with the shotgun? They'll have heard it, and they'll be coming."

The hooded man said nothing. After a moment, he stood, striding over to Michael, looming over him.

"Then it has started. Eight years of waiting, and when it finally happens, I feel unprepared. Funny, huh?"

"What do you mean?" Michael asked. "What do you know about what's happening here?"

The man pulled back his hood. When the grey light diffused through the ocean of mist fell upon it, Michael found that the man did not look like the grim reaper, or some sneering caricature of a terrorist. He looked about fifty: a craggy, nondescript face under a thick tuft of hair long since turned a dull grey. Just another guy; someone that would not receive a second glance in a crowded bar or on a busy street.

There was something in the man's eyes though, some slippery quality that made Michael's nerves jangle.

"What I know," said the man, "is that there is little point now in me killing you, no more point than shooting a beached whale. The die has already been cast, and there are already enough voices whispering at my conscience to add yours to the list. All I really need to do is persuade you to leave my property in a manner that ensures you will not find your way back."

Michael's brow creased.

"What? I don't understa-"

The butt of the gun filled his vision again then, moving at lightning speed, and the lights went out.

*

Rachel's heart twisted in fresh agony as she watched her brother's face contort in dismay and incomprehension. They stood in the cellar, staring down at the ravaged body of their father. The air felt thick, as though she couldn't quite get enough oxygen from it.

Jason's eyes misted up.

"What happened?" He said, his voice heavy, as though the words were a little too wide for his throat to comfortably accommodate.

Rachel reached out and squeezed one enormous shoulder.

"I don't know, Jase. I got here and he was...like this. And the dog was...the dog went crazy and attacked me. That's all I know."

"What about Mum? Where's Mum?"

In a way, Rachel found herself feeling glad that she had no answer for him. Jason had always been much closer to their mother than she had, and the thought of leading him to her lifeless body was too much to bear.

"I don't think she's here. I haven't been upstairs yet, but-"

Jason didn't hear the rest. He turned, and shot up the basement stairs, heading quickly past the blood in the kitchen and out into the hallway.

By the time Rachel made it to the kitchen, he was already upstairs. She could hear heavy footfalls as he pounded into each of the three bedrooms and the bathroom that made up the first floor. She followed him up, trepidation increasing with each step.

When she reached the upstairs landing, she found Jason, face flushed and eyes wild, emerging from his old bedroom.

"Empty," he said. "She's not here. Everything looks normal."

His voice broke on that last word, and Rachel wanted to hug him.

"We have to call the police, Jase," she said. "Whoever did this might still be close by. Mum might need our help. We have to get help."

Jason nodded slowly, almost absent mindedly, as though the words had made it through his ears, but his brain was having trouble making sense of them.

"No signal," he said, his voice clotting again.

"Same here," Rachel replied. She put a hand on his arm and led him into the nearest room, their parents' bedroom, and sat him on the bed.

"I'm going to use the landline, okay? I'll get them to come out. In the meantime, just stay here. You're in shock. I'll get you some water."

Jason nodded, eyes fixed on the floor.

"I'll be right back," Rachel said, and hurried downstairs. The house, previously so terrifying, seemed much smaller now that Jason was there, and so much less intimidating. She recalled how the prospect of searching the upstairs had scared her so badly, and gave silent thanks that her brother had turned up. It was awful seeing him so heartbroken, the normally grinning face stunned and frozen in misery, but his presence in the house gave her courage, like carrying a formidable weapon.

The house phone was in the hallway, sitting on a small side table that served no other function. Reaching it, Rachel cast another quick glance around the ground floor, just to check that nothing had crept inside while they were in the bedroom, and lifted the receiver, keeping her gaze firmly focused on the back door, which still stood ajar.

She knew as soon as she pressed the receiver to her ear that something was wrong, the dial tone she had expected replaced by harsh undulating static, yet still she pressed the buttons anyway, hoping for a miracle. None was forthcoming.

The beeps that accompanied each button push dissolved back into the static.

Clammy fear gripped at her again. Had someone cut the phone lines?

Suddenly Rachel felt trapped; like she was having difficulty breathing.

During her first year at university, long before the requirement to do any actual work kicked in, Rachel and her house mates devised a drinking game, brilliant in its childish simplicity. The catchily-named drink and hide and seek incorporated two floors of their halls of residence, ample square footage to find a spot to evade someone who was, in all likelihood, already seeing double. The rules of the game were thus: play hide and seek. If you get found, you do a shot of tequila. If, after ten minutes, not everyone has been accounted for, the seeker has to do one shot for every unlocated hider.

Rachel had played the game enthusiastically, almost always getting caught due to her inability to stifle the giggles when the seeker drew near. Until the last time she took part: an ill-advised game that took place when she returned with all her friends from a heavy night out. With all the participants already in various states of disarray when the game commenced, it proved to be an unfortunate time for Rachel to squeeze herself into a trunk that just barely encompassed her slight frame, and which, it turned out, could not be opened from the inside.

Months later that night became something she could look back and laugh at, but the night she spent locked in that trunk, while everyone else involved the game either fell into a stupor or just plain forgot they were playing and wandered off, gave Rachel her only glimpse into claustrophobia, and it was an experience that, even when she thought of it months later, sent icy chills through her.

Echoes of that feeling came back to her now, and Rachel was suddenly certain that she could not stay in the house, feeling so vulnerable and trapped, for a moment longer.

She dropped the phone receiver back into its cradle and hurried back upstairs to Jason.

He didn't look up when she entered the bedroom, holding his hands to his temples and staring, wide-eyed, into the carpet, as though the fibres held the answers to the mysteries of the universe.

"We have to go, Jase," she said, a little disturbed to hear a note of panic in her voice.

Jason, still lost in the carpet, didn't respond.

"Jason," she said firmly, wincing a little as she saw him jump at her harsh tone. "The phone's dead. We have to go. Now."

Jason nodded for a second, seeming to mull it over, then stood.

"Get your bag," Rachel continued, trying to keep a lid on the hysteria clawing at her gut. "We're going to the police station. I don't think it's safe here."

Jason's eyes clouded over, as though this was beyond his understanding, but then he seemed to snap out of it, and nodded again, more vigorously.

Rachel ushered her giant brother down the stairs. His bag – a huge and surely unnecessary rucksack sat in the hallway next to her suitcase and shoulder bag. He swung the bag easily up onto his shoulder with one bearlike hand. Rachel decided to abandon the suitcase. Everything she might need – phone, purse, keys – lived in the shoulder bag. It was as she slipped the strap over her shoulder that they heard it, a sound that cracked the silence of the morning in two, entering the house like an intruder, stopping them both dead in their tracks.

A huge roar, louder than anything Rachel could remember hearing in her entire life: a sound that shook the house, making the windows shudder in their frames.

Rachel whipped her head round toward Jason, and saw her own panic reflected in his haunted eyes.

The roar rolled and echoed, fading away like the rattle of a spinning coin on a hard surface.

"What the hell was that?" Jason said in the swollen pause that followed; his voice barely a whisper.

Before Rachel could respond, the world erupted with noise as people flooded out onto the streets, screams of fear and confusion filling the misty air.

It was that exodus, that sudden emptying of all the houses in town, as people sought what they thought was the safety and comfort of the herd, that truly marked the beginning of the end.

*

Victor kept a vehicle, an old flat bed truck, about a mile away from the entrance to his bunker, buried under foliage.

The truck was carefully blemished, dented and scarred so that anyone who might happen across would simply think they had stumbled upon an abandoned wreck. Distressed, he thought with a grim smile, like the fashion for artificially-aged clothing that the internet informed him was currently all the rage.

He cut the cop loose and hefted his slack body. The guy wasn't small, and the journey to the truck would be arduous. He briefly considered leaving him where he lay but decided against it. Just wouldn't be sporting.

Victor had spent years wondering what it would look like, when it all went down. If it went down, though his research – the pitiful, cautious net-trawling he had been restricted to by his isolation and paranoia - had always suggested that they would go through with it. To deny himself now would make it all so much foreplay. All preparation and no end product. The cop provided an excellent opportunity, one that he just could not pass up.

A chance to get eyes on the beginning of the end.

He wouldn't get too close to the town, Victor promised himself. Curiosity, after all, would kill even the most cautious cat.

In the trees, buried somewhere in the mist, he heard the rustling and cracking of people approaching, fast, and nodded in satisfaction. The cop hadn't lied. No one lies to the shotgun.

A thrill coursed through him, and he placed the limp policeman back on the ground gently, like a mother returning her child to its crib.

Then Victor lifted the shotgun, aiming it in the direction of the approaching noise, and waited for them to appear.

# Chapter 6

Derek Graham knew Paula Roberts well, having been her source of minced beef and sausages for fifteen years.

Trade had slowed down for Derek in the last few years as the supermarket in the next town pulverized the competition with impossible prices and buy-one-get-one-free offers. Loss-leaders, for Christ's sake. Special offers designed to lose money. The free and fair market was a smirking misnomer, a barely-concealed sham.

Derek's father had been a butcher, a man who taught Derek to take pride in his work, to make the last slice of the day as carefully as he had the first, and it bewildered him that the majority of people flocked to the giant, soulless food warehouse, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every chicken breast looked identical and every slice of bacon was watery mush. After all, if you weren't going to pay care and attention to the things you put into your body then what would you pay care and attention to?

Derek stuck to his principles and his higher prices. Living creatures had died to make his produce, and to his mind, the least they deserved was to be prepared correctly for the next - and final - stage of their lives and their usefulness.

All of which meant that Graham and Son's Butchers didn't have a huge amount of customers, but the ones that did remain did so loyally, and Derek got to know them all. He knew what most would order as soon as he saw them opening the door.

Mrs Christie wanted gammon, sixteen Lincolnshire sausages, a rack of lamb and six free range eggs. Mr Bale was a poultry man: chicken and duck for week nights, a pheasant for Sunday roast and an eight pound turkey every Christmas Eve.

Mrs Roberts...well, she just wanted gossip. She was Derek's least favourite customer, always hovering around his counter for too long as though she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted (though in reality, Derek knew, she simply stayed in the hope that more people - and thus more gossip - would come in) and she never complimented him on his cuts in the same way his other patrons did. Derek worked hard to ensure that as much fat as possible never made it from animal to customer, and a little appreciation of that fact would not have gone amiss.

In the end, she always ordered minced beef and sausages. There was no artistry in minced beef and sausages.

Still, she was a customer, and Derek had gotten to know her habits extremely well.

Which was why he knew something was amiss as soon as he saw her walking down the street toward his shop. Well, not walking exactly, more...stumbling.

He paused, the sharp blade hovering an inch or two above the leg of lamb that he had been trimming, lamb that had arrived in the middle of the night, so fresh it was still chewing, and frowned.

Derek's shop was in a narrow alley leading off the small square that comprised the town's area of commerce. Not quite an ideal location, but only a few steps away from it, and the plate glass frontage afforded him an excellent view of the town. It was, he had realised long ago, one of the reasons why Paula Roberts was so hard to shift once she had appeared. Like a grease stain.

It was a foggy morning alright, foggier than any Derek could remember, but he could see that the figure approaching was Mrs Roberts, even though her head was bowed, as if in prayer. There was something wrong with the picture though, and it took a moment for him to realise just what it was.

It was her walk. Paula Roberts was moving...stiffly. Not the stiffness of someone who has pulled some muscles the day before, though. More like the stiffness, he imagined, of someone who had woken from a long coma, and had forgotten what muscles even were, let alone how to use them. Like someone learning to use their legs for the first time.

He watched, his work forgotten, as she drew closer, each step somehow faltering. An incongruous image flashed into his mind: Bambi, sliding about on the ice uncertainly, in the magical movie his parents had driven him twenty miles to see all those years before at the small picture house in Haverfordwest.

And then, as Derek watched, he saw something even odder: another figure appeared, perhaps thirty yards behind Mrs Roberts, just barely visible in the shroud of mist. This one, Derek noticed, seemed to be levering themselves to their feet, standing for a moment swaying, as though dazed, before stumbling away. Whoever they were, their gait was a carbon copy of Paula Roberts' shuffling, angular movement.

It dawned on Derek then that there had been an accident of some sort; maybe a car had hit these people. He'd seen in TV dramas the way that people involved in a car accident might stumble around in shock, unaware of their surroundings.

Derek wiped his hands on his apron and rushed around the gleaming counter, his mind suddenly filled with excitement and tension, and though he would never admit it, a little hope that he might be given the chance to play the hero; to do something that would make his bafflingly miserable black-clad teenage sons proud.

He rushed out onto the pavement, and stopped dead when he heard the scream, a chilling, piercing yell of pure fright. The sound was disturbingly close, emanating from somewhere in the square.

And then he saw Mrs Roberts' face, and his jaw went slack with horror when he saw the empty sockets where her eyes should have been.

A slight whimper escaped his lips, and when Mrs Roberts suddenly exploded into motion, coming straight at him, charging, Derek Graham had a moment, just a fleeting frozen second, to realise that he would not be playing the hero after all.

As Mrs Roberts mounted the butcher, sending him crashing to the floor, her teeth frantically seeking out the soft flesh of his cheek, tearing it away with a wet popping sound, the screams in the square began to multiply, fanning out from the mobile epicentre that she had become like ripples on a pond, slowly devouring the calm reflection that had existed before and replacing it with jumbled chaos.

Of course, she had long since ceased to be Mrs Roberts at all, and the person she had been, the person who had woken up that morning, cold toes emerging from the duvet and finding the slippers she needed to start the day, did not even exist now as a memory.

It wasn't hunger that drove her, not exactly, though certainly that was a part of it. No, it was a simple biological imperative, something entirely divorced from logic, or reason, or even insanity. Her existence now was entirely dependent on sinking her teeth into the creatures that moved around her unseen; the malevolent forces she felt ranged against her. She could no more fight against it than could a man hold back the desolate, remorseless advance of age.

It never occurred to her to even try.

Kindred spirits began to awaken around her, and their presence made the creature that had been Paula Roberts feel glad in a way, a little safer. A part of the pack. But there were vast legions out there, all of whom smelled and sounded like the creeping darkness that now ringed her consciousness, entombing it, making her pulse pound wildly. She could feel them all out there in the dark, the invisible army.

Prey.

*

In the confusion that swept through the square, panic spread like a virulent fever.

Those who saw the blood-letting, who knew even as they struggled to comprehend the signals sent from eyes to brain that an atrocity was emerging, something ancient and primal and unstoppable, simply turned and ran blindly. Several, paying no heed to the limited visibility of the morning, smashed into walls or posts, and were swiftly set upon. Others found that the beings that now chased them down seemed indefatigable, reeling in the yards inexorably, until they were close enough to claw and rend their victims.

James Thomas, retired gardener and still-going-strong octogenarian, had only set out for his morning paper that day, but with his knees playing up, had taken the car.

James preferred to walk, even when the pain was present, because he understood that opportunities to get out and enjoy the world, or spend time with others, should always be taken. That was one thing about reaching what the TV euphemistically and poetically referred to as your 'twilight years': if you were lucky enough to hang on to your senses (as many of James' long-time friends had sadly not been) then the world was brought into sharp focus as the timer ticked down toward zero.

So much of the modern world seemed designed to segregate and isolate, everyone sitting in protective bubbles of their own design: they travelled everywhere in cars, knowing only the destination and nothing of the journey that took them there, or they became slaves to their television or their computer or their office, living like ghosts, never connecting with those around them.

James often thought of the time he had visited his grandson living in Bristol, discovering that his evenings were spent lost in an online game of some sort, and that he didn't even know his neighbours' names. James had left after a few days to return home with a heavy heart.

On this day however, the fire that lived in his ancient knees had just been too much, his joints protesting loudly that the previous day's gardening – long hours of planting daffodils and azaleas and rhododendron bushes – had been just a tad too optimistic.

So he took the car, but compromised. He would stop for a cup of tea somewhere and read his paper, hopefully finding a few people to have a natter with before returning to the hollow silence of his empty house.

Now he sat, stunned, behind the wheel as the car trundled to a halt, and he saw the scene unfolding in the square before him, and found to his surprise that eight decades on the planet did not mean he had quite seen it all before.

All around him were people running and screaming, dropping to the floor in sprays of blood, or pouncing on the people who had been their lifetime friends until moments before and tearing them apart with teeth and fingers.

It was incomprehensible, and for a moment he felt the mind that he worked so hard to keep alert with puzzles and hobbies drifting like a leaf on the surface of a fast-moving stream, and he was back there in the unending nightmare, the one he worked so hard to submerge, the furious crimson skies glowering over the lowest ebb in human history. The broken bodies as skin clashed with industrial steel and the insanity of men that had grown too powerful, and too greedy.

This was something different though, something that was immediately apparent. There was no order here, no purpose, no matter how evil or misjudged. Not war. Just chaos and disintegration.

It was only when a man, covered in blood, strips of flesh hanging from his face and eyes that looked like ready-to-burst boils, leapt onto the bonnet of the car and threw himself bodily into the windscreen, sending sharp cracks right across it, that James snapped back into the present and found that age hadn't quite dulled his reactions entirely.

He threw the car into reverse, and stamped on the accelerator, never taking his eyes away from the bloody horror that clung to the breaking glass.

He would, he thought, readily throw himself out of the door when that glass fell away, and, dodgy knees or not, he would run like a teenager.

Such was his focus on the monster trying to get in that he entirely lost the direction of the car, swerving blindly, glancing off the brickwork off one of the buildings that crowded around the narrow streets, the collision threatening to rip the steering wheel from his grasp. The impact made the car shudder and lurch, and suddenly the abomination that had gripped his bonnet was gone, lost in the fog.

James began to give a silent thanks to whatever god was clearly watching over him, and ploughed into the petrol station he hadn't even seen racing toward his rear view mirror.

The world ignited.

*

Michael's bed was hard and uncomfortable. It felt like every spring in the mattress had suddenly downed tools and gone on strike, and was poking him in the back to ensure he fully understood the situation. His sheets felt scratchy too, like that horrible wool blanket you sometimes get in cheap hotels, the one that you throw on the floor before you even consider getting into the bed.

And it was cold. Really cold, despite the fact that for some reason he had fallen asleep fully clothed.

His eyes flew open, and a brilliant star of pain in his skull went supernova.

He wasn't in bed. Not even in his flat.

The view that greeted him, when his eyes adjusted painfully to the unwelcome flood of light, was the sky. Or at least where the sky would be, if it weren't entirely obscured by the mist.

It all came rushing back to him at once, like a system update. The café. The dead men and the bloodied ghouls chasing him through the forest. The bizarre interrogation by the hooded man. The butt of the gun.

Michael tried to sit up and groaned as his muscles twitched and spasmed, sending irate feedback to his brain. As far as Michael could recall, he had managed to get through thirty-plus years without ever being knocked out. Concussions, it turned out, didn't like to dine alone.

Slowly, he eased himself upright, clenching his teeth (and figuring, as the pain hit, that the trip to the dentist he'd been putting off for months was now unavoidable) and swallowing hard to overcome the nausea that erupted in his gut. He felt woozy.

Visit the doctor first, Mike.

When the urge to vomit passed, Michael scanned his surroundings. He had been unconscious in a roadside ditch, presumably just out of view of any traffic that might have passed by. The road itself was deserted, and featureless. Just a strip of tarmac lined either side by overhanging trees. There was no indication of what the road was, and he felt fleeting panic that the hooded lunatic had driven him miles away from home and left him for dead. Better than actually killing him, he supposed, but hardly ideal.

What was it he had said? Something about ensuring Michael never came back? The details were fuzzy around the edges, and every attempt he made to sharpen them up in his mind sent a bolt of pain racing through his head.

It was only when Michael staggered unsteadily to his feet and turned around that he saw the sign.

Welcome to St. Davids

Relief surged through him. He had a couple of miles to walk back to the station. A couple of miles to pray that some kindly driver would happen past and spare him. He thought about waiting, maybe standing in the middle of the road and flagging down the next car that approached, but the roads into town were hardly busy even at the best of times, and with the thick fog making driving an unappealing prospect, there was every chance he could be waiting a long time.

Gingerly, he took a few steps toward the sign, testing out his legs, his arms outstretched and ready to protect his head if he should collapse. The various aches and pains made it feel like he was taking a stroll through the lowest level of hell, but it was manageable, and he found the exercise even seemed to abate the sickness a little.

Those few steps became ten, then twenty, and soon he was pushing forward intently, focused only on getting back to the station, and the radio. Something terrible was going on in St. Davids, something Michael did not understand at all, and all thoughts he'd had of being the guy to solve the problem, and prove he was still worth something as a police officer had long since fled. If ever a situation called for backup, this was definitely it.

The guy in the woods was connected to the atrocity at the café somehow; Michael felt it in his bones, though how a crazy guy with a shotgun could have turned Carl into some bloodthirsty lunatic escaped him. But the lack of surprise when Michael had explained the situation to him...well, if the hooded man hadn't caused the deaths and the gut-wrenching transformation of two good men into bloodthirsty cannibals, he certainly knew something about who – or what – had.

Michael was about ten minutes away from town and still pondering this, when the sky ahead of him suddenly pulsed with a bright orange light. A second later, he heard the roar, and felt the vibrations shake the road under his feet.

The mist prevented him from seeing much, but intuition told him that the Shell station a few minutes down the road had just gone up in a mighty explosion.

With a grunt, Michael tried to hurry his footsteps, pushing the pain back down. When Michael had injured his back the doctors told him not to be afraid of the pain, or to run from it. Pain did not necessarily mean that he was doing more damage when he tried to move and found his sciatic nerve screaming at him, enraged. If anything, they had said, it was remaining immobile, afraid of the pain, and letting the muscles seize up and swell around the damaged nerves, that would cause more trouble in the long run.

He tried to focus on that advice. Each step set off tiny detonations in his skull and his jaw especially but, he forcibly reminded himself, it was only pain.

As he pressed on, slowly drawing nearer to the town, he was able to make out a darker patch in the fog above St. Davids, something that clarified itself further every few yards: A plume of dense black smoke – an honest-to-God mushroom cloud – rising from street level to tower above the town's largest structure, the steeple of the cathedral, like a challenge to God Himself.

*

Victor badly wanted to smoke, and marvelled at the devious, slippery power of cigarettes.

It had been six years since last he had savoured the giddy, light headed rush as the hot smoke curled down his throat and filled his lungs. Six damn years, and the craving never quite went away. Instead it lurked like a childhood boogeyman, hiding under beds and in closets, ready to attack when you least expected it. Watching, and waiting.

It was the first thing Victor had given up when he entered his self-imposed exile, knowing that regular trips anywhere to purchase cigarettes were out of the question, and likely to reveal him, but it had been hard going.

A life spent hunched over computers was a fertile breeding ground for nicotine addiction. The little pauses, the moments of having no choice but to wait while programs installed or processors considered whether they would do what was asked of them without trouble leaving a vacuum that had to be filled. A bit like using public transport: what else were you supposed to do while you stood at a bus stop waiting, with no idea when your journey home might actually begin?

At first he cursed those pauses, impatient that computers, for all their vaunted power, lagged so far behind the human brain. For Victor, whose brain began sprinting the moment it could walk, the waiting was torture, only finally easing up when he discovered the calming effect of smoking, the bitter, delightful punch at the back of the throat.

For a while after he went into hiding he had limited himself to a cigarette every few days, working through the small stockpile he had brought with him to his new home, but, although he had been impressed with his willpower and self control, never breaking down like a true addict and tearing through his supply, oblivious to its finite status, in the end having a smoke every few days was simply masochism, like picking at a wound, never quite letting it heal.

So he gave them up entirely, but never quite beat them.

And now, as he sat watching the monitor, squinting to make out the picture that broke up frequently, he wanted to smoke more than anything.

The signal delivered to the monitor was faint, but getting stronger all the time. The view it gave him was of an empty road, moving toward him at walking pace.

It would take a while for the cop to get somewhere more interesting, Victor thought, and cursed the lack of traffic, unaware that through the screen, out there in the cold swirling mist, the cop was doing exactly the same.

Victor turned his attention to the other monitors, the ones that surrounded his home. The forest remained deserted, and he was satisfied that no one else was coming for him.

His hunch about what the policeman had said to him had been proven correct as soon as those two rejects from a horror movie had turned up, blissfully unaware of the shotgun that awaited them. He was intrigued to find that they had ripped their eyes out, and wondered if this would be the protocol for the rest of them.

Why would they do that? He thought to himself, sipping on a hot coffee. Victor had never had much input on the biological side of the plan, and of course even if he had tried to glean information he would not have had much success, such was the stringent nature of the security measures put in place by those running the show. The various cells of Project Wildfire were purposely kept apart, and some of the lower-level people who had worked on applications and equipment probably would not even recognise their own fingerprints in the gigantic crime scene that was about to unfurl before their very eyes.

Victor had known more, of course. It would have been difficult for them to have him working like some brainless automaton, given just how crucial and complicated his portion of the work was. And of course, to put it bluntly, he was simply too intelligent to remain in the dark, and too suspicious. He didn't know a great deal about how the biology of it worked, but he certainly understood the intentions of it. Those in charge tolerated his knowledge, he guessed, because of the leverage that they had over him, but Victor was keenly aware that he was an irritant, and he was certain that he was the subject of many fraught meetings between those who truly knew what was coming.

Subsequently, it was obvious that his remuneration, when the work was finally done, would be bullet-shaped.

When he realised that as inevitable truth, Victor became...self-employed.

Why the eyes, though?

Perhaps, despite all the efforts of those involved in Project Wildfire, some vestigial semblance of humanity or conscience remained, some unexplored sector of the brain that raged impotently against what it saw, and took the only way out it could.

Certainly he could not imagine that it was an intentional outcome, for it limited the effectiveness of the subjects, and it would make clean-up after the event a bitch. The original plan was to have them crashing together like magnets, making them easier to target when the time was right. Now, surely they would drift like dust on the wind, spreading far and wide.

Victor shrugged mentally. Conjecture was an exercise in futility now. It was done, and it would complete its journey like a driver-less diesel train. All that was left was to survive it, and make sure that the aftermath, with all its ripe opportunity, was available to him.

His eyes flicked back to the most important monitor as the speakers attached to it emitted a distant, tinny rumble.

Damn, he wanted a cigarette.

*

Jason watched as his sister cracked open the front door and peeked out, the blood draining from her face. Her jaw dropped open.

His mind was reeling, struggling to put together the pieces of the last half an hour. It was like a box containing portions of two different jigsaws. No matter how he tried, he could not get the picture they formed to make sense.

He heard the screaming outside, and for a second he believed it was a product of his own imagination, a reaction to the horror of finding his father ripped apart in the basement.

Then he heard it for what it was: a chorus. A great wail of many anguished voices, rising to the heavens as one. Something was going on outside, something terrible.

The realisation snapped Jason back to reality.

"What is it, Rach?"

"Not sure," she responded, her voice cautious. "There are people out there, on the street. They're all looking at something."

"Looking at what?"

"I don't know, I can't see."

Rachel turned to face her brother, her eyes full of concern.

"I'm going to go and look. At the very least, someone out there should have a working phone we can borrow. You want to stay here?"

Rachel's voice was soft and caring, and Jason realised she was wrapping him in cotton wool as she had so often when they were younger. He felt a little fire of shame ignite somewhere deep inside him. This was all wrong; it should be him looking after her, not the other way round. He set his jaw firmly.

"No, I'm okay. Let's go."

As they stepped out into the mist, and away from the horror of their parents' basement, Rachel immediately felt a little more secure. The claustrophobia of the house behind her, she felt herself breathing more easily.

The street was filling up as the residents of the houses spilled out to see what had made the ground under their feet tremble, and their very normality was reassuring. The morning that had, only moments before seemed somehow supernatural and terror-inducing suddenly seemed far away.

In the gardens opposite her, she could see elderly women, their hair still in curlers, preparing for their usual trip out for afternoon lunch, a young mother rocking a squalling baby in her arms; a family huddling together, the two young boys that had been spending their school holiday tethered to their game consoles finally torn back into the real world.

All were staring in the same direction.

Rachel followed their gaze and saw, rising above the mist that seemed thickest at ground level, the column of boiling black smoke making its way steadily up toward the heavens, and she gasped. Now she understood the noise the people on the street were making, the confused wails and frightened yells.

Immediately her mind went to the day that had now become the default image for such events in the collective Western psyche: the terrorist attacks on New York a decade earlier.

She had watched the events at the World Trade Center unfurling that day on TV, just days before she was due to leave home for the first time to attend college. The politics of the event were alien to her, and she did not foresee the impact that jarring September morning would have in the years to come, but she had known instinctively that she was watching something historic and era-defining.

The column of smoke rising from the centre of her home town brought a little of that feeling rushing back, a little of the incomprehension. Rachel always wished she had more patience for the news and current events, but the truth was that keeping up with the various ways people around the world managed to kill each other, or worrying about whatever invisible menace was threatening some aspect of her way of life just made her feel sad and helpless.

Now, as she realised that a huge explosion had taken place near the Cathedral in the centre of St. Davids she found herself wondering if maybe something had happened in the world that she should have been taking notice of, some dreadful event in a far off land that might affect her life even here, in the United Kingdom's very own middle of nowhere. Was this some terrorist attack?

The notion seemed faintly ludicrous. After all, surely if terrorists wanted to attack the UK, there were about a thousand targets that would be more important than a rural town in Wales?

The words of a guy she had met at university came back to her then. One of those guys who, as his eyes were opened suddenly to politics and counter-culture thought, became an expert on world affairs: If they really wanted to strike terror into the people, wouldn't taking out some country town somewhere do the job? Who'd feel safe then? London is obvious, Everyone is expecting that, it's just part of the paradigm. But if they flatten Shrewsbury or Stafford or Middlesbrough, everything changes.

She hadn't paid much attention at the time because the guy, whose name she was surprised to find she now couldn't recall had been insufferable, in love with the sound of his own voice and convinced of his superior intellect. He was erudite, for sure, but when the nuggets of truth were buried under nonsense about aliens or shadowy cultists secretly running the world, you pretty quickly stopped digging for them.

Yet it was terrorism that first came to mind as she watched the smoke, and she shuddered.

"Holy shit," Jason breathed next to her, his voice awestruck.

Rachel looked around. There were perhaps fifty people on the street, or standing in their gardens and doorways. She swept her gaze from face to face, hoping to see comprehension written there, someone who might be able to tell her what was happening. All looked as confused as she felt.

"There's no TV!" Rachel heard someone say, and she frowned. How could there be no TV? Television was the cockroach of modern life: it survived everything, nibbling at the fringes of disasters natural and man-made, always ready to bring high definition torment directly to your living room.

Rachel didn't really think a moderately-sized explosion in Wales would exactly bring the news choppers screaming overhead, but no TV just added to the surreal feel of the situation. A lack of television was like an angry wasp in your bedroom: it had to be dealt with before life could move on. If television was gone, something big must be happening.

She searched for the speaker: a middle aged woman in a bathrobe, her hair bundled up in a hurriedly-arranged towel, and approached her.

"Mrs...Tallis?" She said, moderately impressed that the name was still stored in her brain somewhere.

The woman looked at her for a second, eyes cloudy, before recognition dawned.

"Rachel!" She said brightly, "I haven't seen you since-"

"Did you say there was no TV?" Rachel cut in.

"What? Oh, yes! Every station, just static! I thought it was our aerial, but John next door said it's the same for him. And the internet is down too! Do you think it was the mast that blew up? It must have been the mast!"

Rachel shook her head slowly, processing this new information. She felt a sinking, gnawing sensation in her stomach.

"Mrs Tallis, does your phone work? Or your mobile? We have to call the police."

Mrs Tallis looked at her thoughtfully.

"I don't know dear, I'll just check for you." She gathered her bathrobe about her and rushed back into her house.

Rachel turned to Jason.

"There's something seriously wrong here, Jase," she said in hushed tones. "I don't know what it is, but I think this is all connected somehow. To Dad."

Jason stared at her, and said nothing. Around them, people were starting to head toward the smoke. Fragments of their conversations reached Rachel. They were going to see for themselves what had happened in the centre of their town.

"I think we should go with them, Rach," Jason said. "Safety in numbers, right? And there's bound to be police there, or...someone that we can tell about Dad."

Rachel thought on this for a second, and nodded. There didn't seem to be a better plan at the moment.

"Okay," she said, "But just hold on a second."

Rachel turned back toward Mrs Tallis' house in time to see the woman exiting the front door, shaking her head.

"Phones are down too, dear," she called. "I think it's definitely the mast, or the servers or what have you."

Rachel nodded.

"Thanks, Mrs Tallis. We're going to go and see what's happened, we'll come back and let you know, okay?"

Mrs Tallis smiled her thanks and rushed back indoors. Rachel had a feeling that she would see Mrs Tallis catching up with them in as much time as it took to throw off a bathrobe and jump into clean clothes.

"Let's go," Rachel said to Jason. "But keep your eyes open for anything weird. This doesn't feel right to me."

Jason nodded.

"Will do. But I'm hoping I've already seen all the weird I'm going to."

*

St. Davids Cathedral had stood as a place of worship for almost 1,500 years. Taking its name from the man who built it in the sixth century, the forbidding building around which the city sprang rose and fell like the tide, regenerating, cell-like, after suffering repeated attacks of man and time throughout its history.

The cold stone had watched impassively as Vikings swarmed over it and murdered its bishops, as bandits pillaged the precious metals within; as a twelfth century earthquake shook loose its foundations. The heavy iron doors had withstood the ravages of wind and fire and water; they had provided sanctuary as plague and disease ravaged its congregation.

It was during these times, when nature turned on mankind and provided a reminder that flesh is a temporary prison; a crumbling façade, that people flocked to the Cathedral in search of answers, seeking some reassurance that their decaying, faltering flesh was merely transitional, a step on the journey to a better place.

In recent years, Father Leary's Cathedral had seen attendances drop greatly. Even a town like St. Davids, with an elderly population, many of whom proclaimed themselves religious folk, saw the pressures of the modern world erode old traditions.

Leary had taken it all in his stride. Such was the way of things. For him, the Church's role was not to press people into service, but to remain there and welcome their return when they once again decided that they needed the comfort of God.

Leary's faith did not waver as he turned up each Sunday to the disappointment of a steadily dwindling congregation. He had been a man of devout strength, convinced beyond all persuasion in the presence and work of his Maker. Right up to the last moments of his life, the moments which saw his mind snap in two, his final conscious thought being that the soft flesh of his wife's throat tasted just right, and that Hell was very, very real.

And still the Cathedral stood. And on the morning of the explosion, it drew the people of St. Davids toward it like a magnet; the landmark by which they all navigated as they made their way toward the site of the explosion that had put their lives on pause.

Darkened by the morning mist and the tower of smoke that cast a heavy shadow over it, the Cathedral watched again, as impassive as the absent God that those who still attended prayed to, as humanity began to tear itself apart outside its very doors.

The wave of blood-letting spread outward in all directions, and as more people made their way into the town centre from the outskirts, it began to pick up pace, a tiny replica of the expanding universe; of perfect chaos.

Rachel felt something wrong in the air when the group of people she walked with, her parents' neighbours with their familiar and friendly faces, were still several hundred yards away from the Cathedral, and the town centre.

The roads were twisted, densely packed and lined closely with buildings, making it impossible to see very far even if the mist had not been around to complicate matters, and so it was another of Rachel's senses that first alerted her.

The noise on the streets had remained fairly constant: loud chatter, some screams of surprise, but within them, she detected something else. Diluted at first, yet getting stronger. Increasing in intensity.

Other screams. Screams that mirrored her own in that dark basement: screams of horror and confusion and pain.

For a moment Rachel thought that the screams must be a sign that people had been hurt in the blast; people who were now screaming for help, but there was something about the noise that gave her pause, something that she couldn't quite put her finger on.

Rachel stopped, even as the people around her, becoming aware of the screams themselves, began to pick up pace, and put her hand lightly on Jason's forearm.

Jason stopped a half step ahead of her and looked back, puzzled.

"What is it, Rach?"

"Listen," Rachel hissed, cocking her head to the side as though the movement might let extra noise in, and give her some understanding. "You hear that?"

"The screaming? Yeah, people must be hurt, we should go and help-"

Rachel gripped his arm then; gripped it tightly, her nails digging into his flesh and making him jump, as she realised just what it was about the noise that had unnerved her.

It was getting closer.

Quickly.

"Run!" She screamed, and the unnerving note of terror in her voice drove all doubt out of Jason's mind.

The two siblings turned, sprinting back the way they had come, moments before the first of their neighbours, only a couple of hundred yards further down the road, sank to the pavement in a fountain of blood.

Jason had never been a runner, his sheer size and weight making him ungainly and quick to fatigue. Even during his rugby-playing days he had got by mainly by being hard to bring down; by chugging forward with the ball while the grasping hands of his smaller peers clutched at him, eventually bringing him to the deck via sheer weight of numbers.

As his panic rose, he ran the only way he knew how, charging like a bull at full tilt, with no thought of pacing himself. His lungs began to burn quickly, and he knew immediately that he wasn't going to make it. He had a couple of hundred more yards in him. After that, even terror would not be able to motivate his pounding heart and burning chest to work any longer.

Rachel would have no such issues, he knew. She ran fairly frequently as a cheap means of keeping fit, and while she wouldn't be winning any races, she could comfortably keep going for many minutes.

Rachel could get away, Jason was sure of it. As sure as he was that if he told her he could not, she would stay with him.

He slowed a little, and risked a look over his shoulder.

Behind him, death moved like pouring water, tumbling over obstacles and into spaces; filling all the gaps. It was hard to make sense of it in the mist, with only a glance, but it looked as though everyone was spontaneously attacking each other with their bare hands. There was no rhyme or reason to it; what Jason saw was just an orgy of unfettered chaos. Some who were attacked fell and lay still, others, seemingly oblivious to their injuries, scrambled to their feet and launched themselves at the nearest person.

Each attack brought the wave of violence closer, just as each stride made the ache in Jason's lungs swell.

He was three or four yards behind Rachel, and panting heavily, when he made his decision, and turned to face the onslaught.

A strange, numbing sensation crept over him as he watched them approach. Shock, he supposed, his mind dislocated. Just over an hour had passed since he had arrived at Mum and Dad's house with a grin on his face, expecting a hearty welcome. Right now, he should have been knocking back his second or third cup of tea and attempting in vain to resist his mother's attempts to feed him.

Change had always frightened Jason, and he shied away from unusual experiences, always aware of the shyness that lurked within him, ready to pounce and cause withering embarrassment. When it came down to it, he simply wasn't built to cope with a morning like this. But now he understood what real fear was, and it was not the hopeless social anxiety that had beset him previously. This was fear, this confrontation with imminent death, and it left him cold and numb.

They were so close now that he could almost taste the blood in the air. At least, he thought, I'll take a couple of them down with me. At least Rach will get away.

He clenched his club-like fists. This part, he would be good at.

A strangled yelp left his throat then, as a hand grabbed his shirt and began to pull. He turned, and his heart sank.

"Get moving," Rachel hissed. "This way."

Rachel dragged her brother down an alley that branched off the main street. The alley was short: just a vein that connected the arteries of two larger streets, and it was immediately obvious that the road ahead of them was suffering the same fate as the one they had just left.

They stopped halfway down it.

"You should have run, Rach," Jason gasped between huge lungfuls of air. "You could have made it."

Rachel shook her head angrily, placing her hand on the handle of a narrow green door set into the brickwork of the alley. Locked.

"We're going to make it, you bastard. I'm not losing everyone this morning. Now, how about you put those muscles to some use and get this door open?"

The screams were all around them now. They would be on them in seconds.

Jason lowered his head, tensing the muscles in his arms and neck until veins bulged, and charged.

For a moment, as Jason's massive frame collided with the wood, Rachel was afraid it would resist, but then, as the full weight of her brother just kept coming, like the rear carriages of a crashing train, the door seemed to bend and buckle before her eyes, before finally popping open with a loud crack.

She risked a quick look around as Jason staggered inside cradling his shoulder. For now, as the carnage continued on the streets, they didn't seem to have drawn any immediate attention.

She slipped inside behind Jason, closing the door quietly. The lock was broken beyond repair, but there was a deadbolt, and after a struggle she was just about able to engage it. It was misaligned, and Rachel was extremely doubtful that it would hold up against anyone charging into the door as Jason had, but for now it would have to do.

Outside, the awful noise filling the streets became a little muted.

Inside, the siblings found themselves in a narrow, dark corridor. At the far end they could see a staircase, and an open doorway to a small kitchen. A small window at the far end of the room let in a little natural light. On either side of the hallway were closed doors. The layout brought to Rachel's mind her entry into her parents' house earlier that morning and she shuddered.

Jason was still rubbing his shoulder, wincing.

"We have to check the rooms," Rachel whispered. "Make sure there is nobody else in here. We'll do it together, but be as quiet as possible."

After checking, if the house turned out to be clear, Rachel thought they would have to barricade the door somehow. What they would do beyond that, she had no idea.

One thing at a time, Rach.

It looked like the property was almost entirely bereft of ground floor windows, save for the narrow strip of glass in the kitchen. She doubted anyone could squeeze through there. A stroke of luck.

They moved through the ground floor cautiously, as silently as possible. The place was tiny, low roofs and cramped, square rooms. It was hard to believe this was anyone's house. Modern houses were all about space, and the property market was dominated by airy houses aimed at growing families. A place like this, Rachel thought, would be sneered at by anyone looking to buy. Yet, in days gone by, it had probably been sufficient to house a whole mining family.

Things change.

Her initial assessment had been correct: the tiny house, jammed between two businesses either side - a hairdressers and a small grocery store - had no other windows on this floor, and the only entrance was the one they had broken through.

Rachel felt a little spark of hope flicker to life inside her. Whatever was going on out there, they might just have stumbled upon the perfect place to survive until help came.

They ascended the narrow, winding staircase. The steps were irregular and crooked; a distillation of the house itself: all obtuse angles, everything crammed into a space just slightly too small to accommodate it.

The first floor was made up of two small bedrooms, similar in size and shape to the two rooms downstairs, separated by a narrow bathroom. Each bedroom held a small single bed, side table, closet and a small TV. Each had, like the kitchen, a narrow strip of glass serving as a window to let in some daylight. Rachel crept up to the glass and peeked out. All she could see was the brickwork of the alley wall opposite. The windows were functional: ventilation and daylight only.

The first floor was as empty as the ground had been, and Jason let out an audible sigh of relief.

"Where do you think the owner is?"

Rachel shook her head, frowning. Looking about, she saw no signs of anyone having lived here very recently. A sheen of dust had settled over the surfaces. There were no empty mugs, no filled ashtrays; no used towels or discarded clothes. Nothing to suggest anyone had been in the cramped little house in months.

She tested the handle of the wardrobe, and it swung open easily. All was revealed. Inside, alongside a whole lot of not very much at all, was a wetsuit.

"Surfers," she said.

She knew from phone calls to her mother that St. Davids had seen a growing trend for people buying properties to use as a base for surfing in the summer. The houses were cheap, and the waves some of the best the UK had to offer.

Her mother hadn't liked it, of course – if the trend continued, she said, St. Davids would be nothing more than a ghost town; all empty houses. People dropping in for a couple of weeks a year before rushing off to somewhere more important.

No one to gossip about.

Rachel grimaced. It looked like St. Davids was destined to be a ghost town one way or another.

Jason peeked into the wardrobe and saw the lonely wetsuit hanging on the rail. "Ah," he said. "That's good news right? I mean, at least the place is empty."

"Good and bad, I suppose," Rachel said. "It depends how long we have to hide out here. I doubt there's any food, and if the owners only come by once a year, they might have the water and electricity turned off. But yeah, I'd rather that than have anyone else in here."

Jason's eyes widened alarmingly at the suggestion that they might be there long enough to worry about supplies.

"Good news," Rachel said with a nod.

Jason stepped into the tiny bathroom, his bulk all but filling it, and twisted one of the chrome taps. A thin trickle of water fell from it.

"Water, at least," he said, and then looked up as something caught his eye.

A hatch in the ceiling.

"Looks like it might be for roof access," he muttered, pointing it out to his sister. "You think we should check out up there too?"

Rachel pondered for a moment. On the one hand, the thought of stepping outside again filled her with a cold, slick dread, but on the other, she knew she wouldn't feel entirely secure until she was certain of the boundaries of the property, and whether it really was all clear.

They had to check. Besides, maybe the view from the roof would give them more of an idea about the scale of...whatever was happening outside.

She nodded, and Jason reached up, twisting the catch on the ceiling panel and gently lowering the hatch. A small telescopic ladder fell smoothly out, meeting the carpeted floor with a soft thump.

Once up the ladder, they found themselves in a tiny space that served as an attic. There was just barely room for the two of them to stand upright in the dark. Directly in front of the ladder, they could see a tiny sliver of light: the crack around a door, held shut by a heavy deadbolt.

Jason shot his sister a questioning glance, and, when she nodded, slid back the bolt, letting the light in. Beyond the door stood a small, flat roof, which had been decorated with a couple of long-dead pot plants.

The screams became audible again, rising into the air all around them. Rachel carefully approached the low wall that separated the roof from a nasty drop into alleys on either side. The angle didn't present much of a view of the streets beyond, but it was enough to confirm that the violence was still being unleashed on the roads below. It looked, to Rachel, like it was spreading outward toward the edges of the town. She wondered what would happen then. Would they turn back in, hunting out those people, like herself, who were surely hiding out behind locked doors, or would they simply continue to spread, fanning out across the country?

Neither seemed like a particularly reassuring outcome.

Jason stalked about the roof like a caged lion, peering down at the fragments of the streets that the awkward position of the roof allowed him to view. He moved to the edge furthest from Rachel and peered straight down, at the alley through which they had made their escape.

Rachel's attention was caught by something of an anomaly, a group of the people affected (by what? Illness? Poison? Madness?) was moving against the tide, pouring back the in the direction they had come like water running uphill. Rachel squinted, trying to make out what they were doing through the mist. More and more of them seemed to be turning and joining the swelling group. They were chasing something, something that, incredibly, was moving into the carnage.

As they drew a little closer to her position, she heard a tinny rattle, the whining, lawnmower-plus hum of a scooter.

A gap between the buildings gave her a view of the machine as it moved past at full tilt: on the seat, head down against the wind, was a man in a tattered police uniform.

Rachel was pondering what this might mean, where the cop was going and whether he might have some method in mind for putting a halt to the bloodshed when Jason's voice brought her back to her immediate surroundings with two words that curdled her blood.

"It's Mum."

# Chapter 7

"Go on my son," Victor breathed in something like awe, as he watched the momentum of the picture on the monitor suddenly pick up.

He uttered the words in a rickety Cockney accent: he had long ago started talking to himself, vocalising the meaningless, empty tasks that filled up most of his solitude. That's a smashing cup of tea, Vic. Time for bed now, Vic, or you'll sleep through the whole morning. Better change these batteries before they die, Vic.

It had troubled him a little at first: the first sign of madness, as the old wives' wisdom would have it, but he put it down to nothing more than a need to hear a human voice, even if it was just his own. It wasn't doing any harm now, was it?

By the time he began to add a variety of regional accents to the empty discussions, he had long since stopped worrying about it. Now, meaningless phrases would pour forth from his mouth in Cockney, Birmingham, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French and German accents. It was oddly comforting.

He had noticed the cop picking up on the German accent, which he had delivered as though he were trying to suppress it. There had been no point to the exercise really, just a little game to confuse the policeman. Watching him take mental notes on the accent had almost made Victor burst out laughing.

The grainy picture was rattling along now, the buildings of the town centre approaching fast. Victor didn't think much of the cop's choice of vehicle, but he had no option other than to sit back and enjoy the show. He hoped the cop would make it at least to the centre of town, though he rather thought that the first hurdle might prove too much.

A minute or two to wait.

Victor blew the steam off his black coffee and took a sip, casting a glance around the other monitors.

The television signal had gone down a while ago, probably around the time that Victor had been busy driving the butt of his gun into the cop's jaw. It was no surprise to Victor to find swirling static on every station, but it did provide yet more confirmation that it had started at last.

Disabling mass communication had been step one for Project Wildfire and, he supposed, for any project with such ambitious scope. Phones, TV, Internet. Cutting them off was like cutting the head off a chicken: just a matter of waiting until the flapping body realised it was dead.

He had been relieved to find that it was only the surface Web that had been broken: the deep web, the portals by which those with information that the general population must never see travelled, was still open for business, for the time being at least. As much as the people in charge wanted to keep the infrastructure undamaged as possible, he doubted the web would remain up for long.

The deep web, the invisible playground for terrorists, drug-runners, paedophiles and governments, was not browseable in the same way as its brightly coloured, sanitised younger brother. Sites were marked only with long numeric strings: the virtual equivalent of bouncers on the door. If your name wasn't on the list, you were not only not getting in, you didn't even know there was an 'in'.

There were a few sites there, of course, more well known open(ish) fora with people loudly proclaiming that the events of the day were a conspiracy; petty endless arguments about whether this nation or that government was behind it all, but when the information was so hidden, so esoteric, what was the point in publishing it? The deep web was never going to alert the world to anything, because the world did not know it existed. Putting the warnings there was like printing a newspaper in a long-dead language.

It was through these hidden conduits, the sewers of the electronic world, that the signal was beamed from the micro-camera Victor had placed in a button on the cop's uniform, to the monitor in front of him. Reality television at its finest.

The last show on Earth.

*

Michael hadn't thought much of the scooter, but he was less keen on continuing to haul his aching body toward the town on foot.

The Johnson's house, a few hundred yards from the edge of the town proper, stood alone, like an outpost. Michael had hoped that Ben Johnson would be around, and would agree to give him a lift to the police station, but his frustrated knocking on the front door had been met only with echoes and silence.

He had been cursing his luck and turning toward the pavement again with a heavy heart when he saw the door to the shed standing open, and the scooter just inside the doorway, leaning invitingly against the washing machine. Ben was a cautious, solid type of a man, and so this lapse in security seemed out of character, but it felt like the first break Michael had received all morning, and he wasn't about to turn his nose up at it.

When he entered the dusty shed, full of gardening tools and riddled with spider webs, he found that his luck did not stop there. On a shelf above the washer and dryer, nestled among half-empty paint cans and rusting tools, were the keys.

He searched for something with which he could leave Ben a note explaining the theft, but, finding nothing, decided that a beer and an apology at a later date would have to do.

Relief flooded through him when he heard the tiny engine buzz into life. An old-school fuel gauge on the handlebars informed him that he had half a tank of petrol. Plenty.

The scooter belonged to Ben's son David, who would have been about fourteen or so, and it was comically small when Michael trundled it out onto the driveway and gingerly lowered his six-foot frame onto it.

When he released the little chrome kickstand and found a small bar to rest his feet on, his knees hung mere inches above the ground.

He didn't see a helmet, not that it would matter much. The machine probably only boasted a 100cc engine. If he could get it above twenty miles per hour he would be astonished. Crashing it would almost certainly do him no lasting damage, and the thought of fastening a helmet onto his pounding skull was not appealing at any rate.

Live dangerously, Mike.

He snorted to himself, and set off towards the town.

The outer streets he found eerily quiet, as though the lingering mist had simply swallowed up all the residents. Once or twice he thought he saw faces in windows; anxious eyes looking out, trying to spot some clue as to what might have caused the mushroom cloud that now blossomed hundreds of feet into the air above St. Davids.

It was as he got further in, deeper into the labyrinthine warren of streets that he heard the commotion, and he eased off the throttle, bringing the scooter down to little more than walking pace.

Screams drifted on the wind like confetti, widespread and impossible to miss; warning him to stay away.

Michael thought back to the two men at Ralf's café. To the way Carl had turned suddenly. It was a virus of some sort, had to be, yet surely it had erupted out there near the coast. There had been no sign of trouble earlier that morning when he and Carl had set off. Equally, he was certain that Carl and Craig Haycock must still be stumbling about in the woods far from the town, blind and direction-less. There was no way they could have made it this far already, surely?

Michael brought the scooter to a halt, and listened to the distant cacophony, rising from the streets like a warning siren. He was torn by indecision.

If the plague had made it this far there was nothing he would be able to do. The sensible thing would be to turn the scooter around and head away from the town and keep going. If things were as bad as the distant screaming suggested, the best thing he could do was surely to look after himself.

The screams were getting louder, coming toward him. Probably only a few streets away.

He turned and looked back at the empty road out of the town. The coward's way out.

It was then that the Cardiff Incident popped back into his head.

Michael had joined the Cardiff Police Force at a time when, desperate for new recruits, it had targeted graduates with the promise of a good income and fast tracking to a desk position.

He had just given up a soul-destroying job in recruitment, the fixed-grin hell to which nearly all unfocused graduates flock, and the promise of a career; something to be proud of, had proven irresistible.

Ten years earlier, the prospect of joining the Cardiff Police would have been enough to put even the bravest off: the city, riddled with drugs, unemployment and poverty had been one of the hardest beats in the UK. But years of government investment had turned Cardiff into a boom town, with renovation spreading from the docks outward, blossoming like a flower. Housing prices went up and up, the population veered from lower to middle class, and while the neglected underclass remained, it had been pushed to the edges and painted over. Forgotten.

Michael had been accepted quickly. He was physically fit, and showed a great aptitude for dealing patiently with people. His colleagues liked him, and for a while he felt happier than he had ever been in his life, part of something that could make a difference.

The fast-tracking to a desk position, promotion to detective, proved more elusive, and he walked the beat for almost five years, but he didn't really mind. The pay was good, and the cheery lieutenant who was in charge of his section became a good friend. Promotion, he was promised repeatedly, was not far off.

Until that bright October morning, and the call to attend the domestic disturbance, until the dark presence that Michael had always feared lurked inside him somewhere, the shadow of his father, finally broke violently free.

Until the corridor of blood and bone.

Michael shook away the grasping memories and tore his eyes away from the empty road that led away from town. Running was not an option. He had failed as a police officer once already. Every instinct screamed at him to head to Aberystwyth, to ensure the safety of his wife and daughter, but he dismissed the thought angrily. If the infection, the madness - whatever it was - got out of St. Davids, it would get there long before he could. If he was going to make a difference, it had to be here; had to be in St. Davids. The best thing he could do for Claire and Elise was ensure the infection did not spread.

He twisted the throttle, and set off into the town.

He knew before he rounded the final deserted street corner that the noise he heard was something more than anguish at seeing the destruction wrought on the town centre by the explosion. Knew it deep in his gut, where the truth squirms and writhes until it can not be ignored.

Yet nothing prepared him for the sight that greeted him.

The streets were painted red with blood. Dead bodies and dismembered limbs scattered the cobbled surface of the road, and everywhere Michael looked, he saw terrified people sprinting in all directions, chased by their former friends and neighbours, blood-soaked horrors from a fevered nightmare.

A thousand Craig Haycocks had been unleashed on St. Davids. An army of men, women and children reduced to insane savagery. An army that grew larger by the minute as those whose wounds were not fatal rose from the ground, faces twisted into masks of pure hatred, and laid siege to whatever they could catch. St. Davids was lost, a casualty of a war that had erupted from nothing barely two hours before.

The police station was a few hundred yards away, just a handful of streets. The radio inside would not save the town now, Michael was sure of that, but there was something larger at stake. Whatever this madness was, this disease that turned ordinary people into rabid animals, it had to be contained. Once it spread from St. Davids, once it hit larger populated areas like Carmarthen and Haverfordwest, there would be no stopping it.

Michael gunned the throttle, shuddering as he saw several eyeless faces swivel toward the sound, and raced forward, squeezing every ounce of power out of the scooter.

As he swept past some rubbish bins he snatched up the lid off one, a dented metal circle that would serve as a primitive shield.

The cobbles didn't help, making the small wheels of the scooter bounce wildly, sending jarring currents of pain up into his arms, and he was afraid that he might lose his grip on the handlebars entirely, sealing his fate. He clenched his fingers tightly, keeping his head down, trying to focus on the path ahead; avoiding looking directly at the horror unfolding around him.

The fast-moving noise of the scooter seemed to confuse the infected people initially, and they paused, heads swinging like antennae, as though struggling to get a fix on his position.

As he ploughed through a gap in their ranks, bursting through the main bulk of blood-soaked people and out the other side, where they were less densely packed, Michael even thought that maybe that confusion would be enough to get him through the worst of it.

Until he glanced over his shoulder, and saw the pack forming behind them. The noise emitted by the scooter had turned him into some grisly depiction of the Pied Piper.

Michael grimaced, and returned his gaze to the road ahead, swerving away from grasping, red fingers.

Reaching the end of the street, he veered left, almost crying out when he felt the blood-soaked tires slipping as they left cobbles and hit smooth tarmac, threatening to slide out from underneath him. He fought to correct the slide, shifting all his weight to the right-hand side of the scooter, bringing it upright again. A loud squeal. Michael didn't know whether it came from the tires, the straining engine or his own throat.

Ahead, the street he had entered, Market Street, was the longest straight road in the town, leading directly to the centre shopping square, dominated by the cathedral.

The road, he noted gratefully, was empty other than the bodies of those whose wounds had been too deep, and he couldn't help but take in the details: throats torn open, bellies ripped apart to reveal glistening organs, sightless eyes fixed on the empty grey sky.

At the far end of the street, he saw the wreckage of the blast site, and realised his guess had been correct. Buried under the remains of the petrol station roof was a heap of twisted metal that just about revealed its original identity: the rear end of a car that had smashed into the pumps, starting the blast that had blown out windows all along the street.

The wreckage resulting from the explosion was spread over an enormous area, filling and blocking off the road. There was no way the scooter would make it through.

Dismay filled Michael, and the snarling of his pursuers suddenly seemed to fill his ears, as though somehow they were able to detect that their prey was running out of ideas and places to run.

Frantically, he cast his eyes left and right, searching for an option, even as the scooter, which now seemed to be travelling impossibly fast, ate up the yards.

There were no roads leading off Market Street before the blockage at the petrol station. He saw a couple of slender alleys, but knew he would have to slow almost to a stop to make the turn into them, and it was a turn he would have to make blind, with no knowledge of what lay in the alley waiting for him, or whether the exit was impassable.

He glanced over his shoulder again. They were still coming: not gaining on him, not falling away. Just relentlessly chasing him down. He couldn't tell how many, but the glance was enough to reveal he'd have no chance of fighting them off, even with a weapon.

Despair threatened to overwhelm him. He saw the face of his daughter, tears running down her cheeks as her mother passed on the news that Michael was dead. The face of his wife, the woman he loved so much and had let slip away, and thought of all the time he had wasted. All the time he could have spent trying to talk to her, trying to let her know that the man she had fallen for was still within him somewhere, shackled by invisible chains of his own making, fighting for freedom.

The rubble blocking the street was a hundred yards away now, closing at an impossible speed. Michael fixed his eyes on it. He would smash into it at full tilt, praying that his head would connect with concrete and spare him the terrible end that chased him, a death of tearing fingers and snapping teeth.

And then he saw it. Light glinting to his left. The plate glass store front of Meg Jameson's little wedding dress shop. The decision was made subconsciously, Michael's mind realising that there was no time for debate. In this situation, there were no pros, no cons; only survival.

Using his right hand to hold the bin lid up, offering at least some protection for his head, he twisted the handlebars with his left, and sent the scooter at full speed into the glass.

The world exploded around him.

Sharp pain sliced into him: his legs, his arms, his back. A bloody roadmap etched onto his skin through the uniform.

And the world moved in staccato, a sequence of images captured in his mind, playing like a slide show: Glass showering over him like raindrops. The lid he had been using as a shield slipping from his fingers, crashing into a mannequin dressed like an angel. The scooter sliding away from him, continuing its journey into the shop counter, where it buried itself deep in the flimsy wood. His legs twisting painfully underneath him. The floor rising toward his face at alarming speed. His daughter's face, eyes red and lined with tears, screaming at him to-

Get up!

And then, incredibly, Michael was on his feet again, oblivious to the pain, hurtling down a narrow passageway and shaking stinging sweat and blood from his eyes, smashing through the door that stood at the far end of the building, and then out onto the streets once more, racing among the bodies, running for his life.

*

She could sense them, somewhere in the dark, somewhere close.

The creature that had been Paula Roberts did not understand why the presence of the two creatures was different from the rest, nor why she felt so drawn toward them. All she knew was the boiling of her blood, the frantic thrumming of the cells that formed her existence, a terrible vibration that seemed to make her head spin.

The blackness gave away nothing, and her ears, suddenly so sharp, so reliable, twisted this way and that, hoping to catch something on the wind, some answer that might abate the gnawing hunger that drove her. Here in this scent was something different, something that stood out, some inexplicable gravity that she felt compelled to obey.

Maybe it was the consumption of these two creatures that would finally release her from the hunger.

She reached out her bloodstained hands, finding only a solid object in front of her. They were there, right there. They should have been within her reach. So close she could smell them. The scent was so strong. Intoxicating; overpowering. Different somehow to the stench of the other creatures that she felt compelled to tear apart.

She began to pound against the obstruction before her, roaring in impotent rage. She threw her considerable weight into it, oblivious to the pain as her soft flesh connected with it; frenzied.

And then, as she charged into it, her ears picked up the sound of something beyond. A cracking. Groaning. The sound of something loosening. It was beginning to give.

With a roar, she charged again.

*

Rachel peeked over the low wall that served as a boundary for the flat roof, and her heart broke.

Jason was right. There, in the narrow alley below them, the one into which she and Jason had fled scant minutes before, stood their mother. Paula Roberts had a chunk of her left arm missing, the forearm looking as though something had taken a bite out of it. What was left of her ragged dress was drenched in blood. When the wind caught the flimsy material it was pulled apart, revealing sagging, naked flesh underneath.

Somehow that was the worst part for Rachel, worse even than the empty sockets where her mother's eyes had been. There was something so total, so final, about seeing her mother standing half naked on the streets, something that left Rachel in no doubt that this parent was as lost to her now as the one that lay unmoving in the basement of his house.

She glanced at Jason, who was shaking his head as though answering a question, eyes wide and streaming with tears. He began to emit a low moan, and Rachel clapped her hand over his mouth, silencing him.

In the alley, their mother was standing near the door that Jason had smashed open. As Rachel watched, she swayed, appearing almost drunk, her head swinging back and forth.

Rachel tried to compartmentalise the horror of it, forcing the desire to scream into a dark corner of her mind.

She wanted to look away, but some part of her brain was still functioning rationally, something that told her that they needed to know what they were up against, and so she forced herself to watch.

Their mother began to move back and fore, small stumbling steps, moving in a circle, as thought trying to find something. Still her head was swinging around, and Rachel realised suddenly that she was sniffing the air, like a dog trying to pick up a scent. Her movements were becoming more frenzied, steeped in frustration, and then she roared.

It was a noise that Rachel would never have believed could have come from her mother: a hoarse bestial scream of rage that made the hair on Rachel's arms and neck stand up and her skin crawl.

She realised that she was holding her breath, every muscle in her body clenched in terror.

And then the pounding started. At first with her fists and then with her entire body, Rachel and Jason's mother began to attack the door that separated her from her children. Rachel thought of the broken lock, and the deadbolt. She prayed it would hold and cursed herself for not returning to barricade the door as soon as they had known the house was empty.

A whimper escaped Jason's lips and the pounding in the alley below increased in intensity. Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, afraid to look, and heard one final, enormous bang, and then silence.

When she peeked again, her blood ran cold.

The alley was empty, and the door, weakened already by Jason's assault, had been smashed in.

Their mother was in the house.

"Oh fuck," she heard Jason say, the words reaching her dimly as though shouted to her from a great distance.

"The ladder! We have to pull up the-"

"No time!" Rachel screamed. "GO!"

She grabbed Jason's collar and thrust him toward the boundary that separated the roof from that of the next building. There was a sheer drop on two sides, but the terraced buildings would allow them to run at least some distance before negotiating a path to the ground became a problem. Even as Jason began to move, the door to the attic burst open, and the bloodstained monster that had been their mother rocketed toward them, snarling.

As Rachel turned, she felt fingers grasping at her hair and cried out in pain as it was torn out at the root. She hurdled the wall, landing on the tiled roof of the next building, almost losing her footing and scrambling forward on all fours, feeling the angle of the roof working against her. Jason was a few steps ahead of her, clumsily charging forward, each footfall loosening and cracking the tiles.

Behind them, their mother was also scrabbling, oblivious to the drop that yawned below them, scampering across the tiles, clawing for Rachel's foot, missing by inches.

And then it happened, as Rachel had known it must. Her foot hit a tile that betrayed her, slipped away, sending her crashing onto her belly.

Her mother was on top of her in a heartbeat, face diving forward, and in that instant Rachel saw it all unfold: the teeth tearing into the flesh of her neck, snapping through tendon and artery, scraping on bone.

She shut her eyes, trying to block out the vision, the horror of the woman who had brought her into the world savaging her like a rabid bulldog.

And then she felt a heavy weight land on her chest, knocking the air out of her. The tearing teeth did not connect.

Instead, when she opened her eyes again she saw her mother's body slumped on top of her, a sharp fragment of tile buried in her forehead, and her brother standing over them both, shaking; the honest, smiling eyes darkened and empty, as though the light that had powered them had simply been flicked off.

# Chapter 8

Watching the monitor, the weak, jerky signal beamed from the police officer's uniform, Victor felt strangely stunned.

It was an emotion he hadn't expected to feel. Indeed, he had long since thought that his emotions had simply faded away, victims of his long isolation.

Of course, he had been able to visualise the way Project Wildfire would pan out, when finally it was activated. He had seen numerous movies, read numerous books, all featuring the kind of calamity which was now being played out just a few miles from his home. He knew that these cultural artifacts served as both a blueprint and a warning.

It would be fast, and it would be brutal. It was the reason, well, one of the reasons, why he had built himself an underground home and turned it into a fortress. It was, after all, exactly what those running the project had done, retreating into the safety of the earth. It was all that could be done. The storm was inevitable. The best anyone could hope for was to shelter under an umbrella that would keep out the worst of it.

Still, seeing it now, the savagery of the blood-letting awakened a feeling of deep, confused dismay within him.

He had watched as the cop moved into the town on the little scooter in a state of heightened anticipation, like a child waiting for Christmas morning. And when finally the cop turned a corner and came face to face with the wildfire torching the town, Victor had not been disappointed.

But then something odd had happened. The policeman, of course, would turn tail and flee. That was the only normal, logical response. Hell, Victor half expected that he would find his way back to Victor's little spot in the woods, searching for a place to hunker down. Instead of this though, the grainy black and white picture had paused for a second, giving Victor ample time to see the full scope of what was happening on the streets, and then he had shot forward, going straight for them.

Had the man decided to give it all up and let death have him? It made no sense to Victor, the irrationality of it, and anger burned in the pit of his stomach, along with something else, something he hadn't encountered for years. It felt like...shame, and it just angered him more.

As the picture on the monitor weaved between the murderous arms that clawed toward it, Victor realised that this was no suicide attempt, this was movement with a purpose, a design that Victor could not comprehend.

When the man turned the scooter toward the window and drove straight through it Victor was electrified, and when, after a moment of stillness the picture moved again, rising up and charging toward a closed door and out into an empty street, Victor was being pulled apart by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, the cop's heroics made him want to punch the air in delight, and on the other, he felt an enormous, implacable anger building within him, a rage so all-consuming that he nearly put his fist through the monitor.

None of the policeman's actions made sense to him, and his lack of understanding made him feel stupid.

The last time Victor had felt stupid, he had been a child of around ten.  He had spent weeks one summer collecting spent matchsticks and, left to his own devices for much of the time while his father worked and his mother drank, he had retreated to his room, where he spent hour after painstaking hour carefully glueing them together, following the instructions in a modelling magazine one of his school friends owned.

For days, the structure resembled little more than an angular mess but then, as Victor continued to work, the final model began to take shape before his amazed eyes: The Queen Elizabeth class Battleship Valiant, the ship his father had served aboard during World War 2.

When it was finished, after the long, agonising hours spent waiting for the last dab of glue to dry, he had excitedly run to his father, grabbing the large, rough hand and dragging him to the bedroom.

He had expected his father to be delighted, to grab Victor and hug him, congratulating him on the magnificent ship, which measured nearly two feet across. Instead, as Victor watched, his father's eyes seemed to mist up for a moment before fixing Victor with a cold, hard stare.

You're too old to be playing with toys, his father had said, his voice laced with steel, and then he had balled up one calloused fist and smashed it down onto the model, severing the ship nearly in two.

The tears had come for Victor then, spewing forth; uncontrollable, and his father strode away, shutting the bedroom door behind him with a bang, never once looking back.

When the tears finally stopped, Victor continued his father's work: pounding on the remains of the ship with his small fists until it was just matches again, just a mess that needed to be cleaned up. With each blow, he vowed that he would never again let himself be so stupid.

Victor blinked at the monitor, and realised his fists were clenched tightly enough to make his fingers ache.

The building toward which the cop was now running revealed all: St. Davids' tiny police station. There was no great heroism or mystery to his deeds after all: he was just a man running for help. A man blissful in his ignorance and running in the wrong direction.

Victor laughed aloud, a cruel, mirthless cackle that made some part of his personality, the part that long ago had tried to build something to make his father smile, shrivel back into a dark corner.

*

Michael ran, a trail of spattered blood marking his passage, mingling with the crimson torrents that stained the road beneath his feet. He wondered dully how much of the precious liquid he had lost, and how much there was left to lose.

They were still coming after him, but the journey through the wedding shop had bottlenecked them, slowing the majority down, giving him a chance to put clear daylight between himself and his pursuers.

Ahead the street was clear. Bodies lined the streets like gruesome monuments, cooling in the wintry air. They told the story of what had happened here, of what had swept through, and by their stillness they reassured him. The virus - the disease, whatever it was - moved like fire, burning up the resources in the area and moving on, leaving only death behind. He had feared that the town centre would be packed with the monsters, but there was nothing here left to kill. The only ones present now were the ones spilling out of the rear entrance of the wedding shop, the ones following him.

The sign marking the police station hung over the street just ahead of him, lit like a halo. The building was small, but the doors were heavy, and solid. Once inside, he would be able to lock them and keep his pursuers at bay. Getting to the radio was all that mattered now. If he had to, he could lock himself into the station's single cell and stay there, like an exhibit at a deranged zoo where all the dangerous creatures roamed outside the bars.

He hoped it wouldn't come to that, and knew from experience that silence was the most important part of evading the afflicted people that chased him. Eventually, surely, they would be pulled away toward other, more interesting prey, and he could think about exiting the station, and the town, and just how he was going to get to Aberystwyth before the infection reached it.

There was no time for caution when he opened the door to the station. Now that he was on foot, the distance between himself and the murderers chasing him was narrowing rapidly. He threw himself inside, slamming the door shut behind him.

A metal bar could be placed across the interior of the door as a security lock, and Michael heaved it into place before sinking to the ground, gasping for air.

Sitting on the hard floor, his back against the heavy door, Michael felt rather than heard the frantic, enraged pounding of the creatures that he had eluded for the second time that day. The dizziness and pain swelled inside him, his headache now a constant, sickening thump, threatening to pull him into oblivion only for the shards of glass embedded in him to bring him back with their stinging bite.

His uniform was drenched with his own blood, the fabric sticking to the wounds. His vision swam, and as the pounding on the door receded, fading in his ears like the chugging of a departing train, he allowed the darkness to take him.

He dreamed again of betrayal, as always. A familiar friend that comforted and undermined.

In his dream, he sat in a room, waiting for someone; someone he knew intuitively would never come. The dream was lonely and frightening: the room he sat in darkened, with menacing shadows that loomed in the corners, shadows in which a hungry presence also waited, waiting for him to fall asleep.

He was sitting on a small single bed, the only furniture in the room, next to a window. The curtains were pulled back, and the window seemed filled with a bright orange light, yet none of this illumination seemed to enter the room.

The shadows lengthened.

He had to stay awake, even though he knew that whoever he was waiting for, whoever was going to rescue him from the gaping maws that waited in the dark would never come.

He rose from the bed and made his way to the door. Opening it, he saw a dark corridor, but there was a light at the end, a doorway. Leading to a bathroom, flooded by a beautiful bright light that chased away all the shadows. He stumbled toward the safety of the light, chased by the thickening darkness, his heart hammering and beads of sweat popping out on his brow, until finally, gloriously, he fell into the welcoming light.

Tiredness threatened to overwhelm him, tempting him toward the shadows, and he struggled to his feet, levering himself up against the sink.

He leant over the sink and twisted the cold tap. Icy water tumbled over his hands, and he made a basin of his palms and splashed it onto his face. The feeling was heavenly, invigorating. He would survive the betrayal of this solitude after all; would survive until the light of the world flooded into the building once more.

He raised his head and stared at the mirror directly in front of him. The tear-stained face of his daughter stared back her eyes red and filled with the realisation that her father had let her down.

Claire.

Michael's eyes flew open.

He was sitting in the empty police station, in silence and darkness. Hours must have passed since he lost consciousness. Panic surged within him.

With a grunt, he pulled himself to his feet, moaning as the cuts that had begun to congeal split open once again. The pain in his right calf was the worst, and when he looked down, he felt nauseated by the sight of a large shard of glass disappearing into the flesh. Grasping at the protruding end, he pulled the glass from his flesh, stifling the urge to yell in pain, and let it fall from his fingers to the ground.

There was a first-aid box on the wall, which he knew would at least be well stocked. The police station's single cell was only ever really used as a drunk tank, and people rarely made a visit without also bringing some minor injury along for the ride.

He popped the catch and pulled out some antiseptic ointment and gauze. The uniform came off like sunburnt skin, peeling away from him reluctantly and painfully where fabric had fused with the gashes in his skin.

Once he was standing in his boxer shorts, he surveyed what damage he could see. He was covered in bruises and cuts, most nothing more than scratches, but two or three deep and ugly-looking. He smeared the stinging ointment on the worst of them, and wrapped the gauze around them as tightly as possible, paying particular attention to the deepest, the one a few inches above his right ankle. As he bandaged it, he wondered if the glass embedded in his leg had saved him from bleeding out while he was unconscious, and a shudder ran through his whole body. Somehow, the incredible events of the day hadn't quite seemed real while he was living through them but now, in the quiet darkness, gazing at the patchwork scars on his body, the memories made him tremble.

There were painkillers in the first aid kit, just plain old aspirin, and he poured himself some water from the cooler and swallowed a couple, then knocked back two more with a shrug, and turned his attention to the radio.

Picking up the receiver felt a little like checking the lottery numbers: there was hope, but little expectation. Michael wasn't surprised. He depressed the button, spoke his badge number and gave the code for the Haverfordwest station, and received only static in return. Several attempts, no success. The entire exercise had been pointless, as he should have known it would be.

You should have run away Mike, he thought with a grim smile, but you never did make good decisions.

Filling his plastic cup with more water, Michael limped to his desk and slumped in the chair, hoping that some idea, some strategy would reveal itself.

Then it has started.

The words formed in his mind like pooling water. They were something he had been trying to remember earlier, weren't they? Something creeping through his subconscious as he had walked, concussed, toward St. Davids.

Lost in thought, he prodded absent-mindedly at the paraphernalia on his desk: pens, a roadmap, a folded piece of paper emblazoned with his name written in Glenda's spidery, sprawling handwriting. It was meaningless detritus now, like copper pots exhumed at an archaeological dig. Remnants of the importance of days gone by.

Then it has started.

He frowned, struggling to figure the relevance of the words, and then it hit him. The hooded man. The words had made no sense to Michael at the time but now, suddenly, they practically screamed at him.

The carnage in St. Davids was no accident, not the outbreak of some new disease. That man had been expecting it. If there were answers out there, the hooded man would have them.

He poured the rest of the water down his throat and crushed the plastic cup, letting it fall from his fingers unnoticed, staring intently at the padlocked weapons cupboard.

*

Victor had watched the motionless picture on the monitor for a long time, his expression thoughtful.

It was, he had to admit, kind of funny that the policeman had made it so close before succumbing to his wounds. At the very least, he had put on an entertaining show. A real life action movie.

Ultimately though, it had proved a disappointing end for Victor, the thrill of the chase ending in such anticlimax. He wished he had planned for the event a little more carefully, thinking of all the wasted nights during which he could have ventured into St. Davids and discreetly installed cameras to give him a view of the tiny city.

It wasn't his fault, of course, Project Wildfire had never been given an official start date, and Victor had thought it would have been a few years yet before they set it in motion. It was a missed opportunity that nagged at him, but at least the policeman had turned up that morning. That had been a stroke of luck.

He was still staring at the monitor when the proximity alarms began to beep, and the anti-personnel devices began to detonate, far off thumps that sounded harmless in the bunker, but which he knew were devastating up close.

They had reached this far then, the Infected. Presumably St. Davids was now picked clean and they were moving further afield. He cycled the monitors through the cameras installed around the woods. Maybe the show wasn't quite over after all.

# Chapter 9

The 'weapons cupboard' was something of a misnomer. A metal box that was attached the wall in much the same way as the first aid kit, it was roughly the size of a typical bathroom cabinet, and covered in dust. To Michael's knowledge, it hadn't been opened since the day it had been installed.

He imagined that in London or Birmingham or Manchester there were huge armouries, enormous rooms filled with tear gas and riot shields and M4 assault rifles. When he fished the keys to the cupboard from a desk drawer and popped it open, what he found was a flare gun and three rounds, and two tasers.

The tasers, he recalled, had been distributed amongst all UK police a few years back in a bid to whip up some positive press about bolstering security with 'non-lethal' solutions. He'd seen one in action once, in Cardiff; a junkie waving a pathetic knife around brought to the ground, flopping like a landed fish after the two wicked prongs the device shot out caught him in the chest and delivered thousands of volts into his system.

They would have to do. He had slipped on a spare jacket, discarding the torn, bloodstained iteration he had worn earlier, and he slipped both tasers into the side pockets. After a moment's consideration, he took the flare gun as well. It would make a lousy weapon: at anything but the closest of ranges accuracy was all but impossible – and of course, if he needed to use it against any infected people, it would be useless: the burst of light wasted on the eyeless monsters.

Still, better to have it and not need it...

He retraced his steps taken that morning, trying to figure out the location of the hooded man's strange, squat dwelling. He would be able to find the spot that he had entered the woods fairly easily, just a few hundred yards South of Ralf's café. After that, he would be trusting to luck, and hoping that in his wild flight he had managed to notice at least some landmarks.

At last there was nothing left for him in the police station. He took one last fruitless crack at the radio, and moved to Glenda's reception desk. He hoped Glenda had made it away safely, though he knew deep inside that the hope was just delusion. The explosion would have drawn her out onto the streets inexorably. At least, he hoped, she had been one of the lucky ones: the dead that now littered the streets. The alternative, that ghastly transformation into a blind cannibal, a deranged artist's impression of humanity, was too awful to contemplate.

She had left him one final gift: her keys sat in a dish on her desk, nestled among paperclips and post-it notes. Glenda always walked to work - she only lived about ten minutes away - but Michael knew that she owned a small hatchback, which he would find parked outside her house. At the very least, he would not have to move through the streets looking for an unlocked car or search through the pockets of the dead to find keys. It was a relief.

He snatched up the keys and slipped the one for the car off the fob. Glenda seemed to possess about a hundred keys on a massive ring, and Michael did not want to carry them all, jangling in his pocket like a bell on a cat's collar, warning the animals of his approach. He slipped the key into a breast pocket, and stepped to the door.

Carefully, making as little noise as possible, he lifted the heavy bar that blocked the door and set it down gingerly, wincing as the tiny clanging noise it made as it connected with the tiled floor. The action made him feel like a child again, creeping around his parents' house like a ghost, trying to make as little noise as possible, doing all he could to avoid having his father's attention fall on him. It was something he had become exceedingly good at: moving slowly and carefully. Silence and stealth were just a matter of discipline and endless patience.

He eased the station door open a crack, and spent long moments surveying the darkening street outside.

It was early evening, and the mist that had been woven through the streets that morning was gone, leaving a clear, starlit sky. The street itself was deserted, and dark, every window, whether shattered or still in one piece, utterly devoid of light.

The centre of St. Davids was a ghost town.

Michael studied every corner, every shadow for a long time, battling the uneasy feeling that the street was staring back at him somehow. He saw no movement anywhere. From what he had seen of the people infected by whatever virus had crippled the town, the primary symptom was chaos. They were pure primitives, moving and striking without thought or strategy. Michael could not believe that now they might be waiting patiently for him, luring him out into a trap.

No, they were mindless savages, operating on some primal animal instinct, and the silence meant that they were definitely gone.

Widening the door a little, he slipped out into the cold night, casting a glance to the left and right, ready to spring back inside at the first sign of movement.

Emboldened by the stillness of the street, he crept forward, his confidence gradually increasing, and began to walk the shortest route to Glenda's house.

He continued to move as silently as possible, and kept his ears pricked for any unnecessary sound he might be making. It was this focus that allowed him to hear it.

Whenever Michael took a few faltering steps forward, there was a faint rustling that ceased whenever he halted.

He tested the theory a couple of times, moving and stopping, ears straining to catch the sound, until he was absolutely certain.

He was being followed.

*

Jason had not moved or spoken for hours.

Rachel watched her little brother closely, a knot of worry churning in the pit of her stomach.

They had remained on the roof for a long time with their dead mother, Rachel barricading the door to the attic as best she could, and keeping a careful watch on the alley below.

While she stood lookout, Jason slumped to the ground, sitting cross-legged, as he had always sat in front of the television as a little boy, and stared unblinking into the distance.

She had tried to coax whispered conversation out of him, tried to reassure him that he had done nothing wrong, that killing their mother had been the only option, but Jason did not seem even to hear her pleas.

He was in shock, Rachel was sure, his mind retreating from the horrors of the world to the safety of some inner sanctuary, but as the hours wore on, she became more and more concerned for his mental health, and increasingly frustrated that she had no idea how she might be able to help him.

When two hours had passed, and the streets below remained empty, she ventured down into the house to get some water for Jason, and, in the isolation of the narrow kitchen, allowed the strength that she had tried to maintain for her brother leak away, to be replaced by overwhelming despair. She cried then, for her dead parents, her ailing brother, and herself.

What could have happened to the people of the town? Rachel had seen plenty of zombie movies: silly apocalyptic stuff featuring shuffling corpses hungry for human brains, and the way the people of St. Davids had turned on each other brought these to mind, but there was no such thing, not in the real world. Not the world of jobs and bills and microwave meals.

Besides, these people were not the walking dead, slurping on brains. When they were injured too badly, it seemed as though they died in just the same manner as anyone else. The frenzied bloodlust, the terrible violence: that seemed to come from some primitive place, as though logic, reason – humanity itself – had simply been turned off. Like the generator of civilisation had run out of fuel.

She wept softly for a few minutes, releasing the pent-up emotions that threatened to drive her mad, and then pulled herself together. Whatever had happened in the town, whether it was some mass hysteria or some terrible contagion, Rachel and Jason had survived the worst of it. And they would go on surviving.

On the roof, some hours later, she looked at Jason again, and the untouched glass of water, and doubt crept into her mind. Was there any point in surviving, only to find your mind broken by the savage, incomprehensible restructuring of the world around you?

What if the whole world was like this? What if St. Davids wasn't the start of the epidemic, but just another outbreak, nothing special about it at all? Was there another Rachel, cowering on a rooftop in London or Leeds or Glasgow, waiting for help to come? What if there was no help?

Rachel dismissed the thought angrily. Diseases – and this had to be some sort of hideous disease – didn't just happen. There was a starting point; a zero patient; an epicentre from which everything spread.

If the horrors unleashed on St. Davids over the past few hours had already occurred in other towns and cities it would have been all over the news for days, and she would have seen the signs. Quarantines, alert levels, and above all, panic buying, the all-too-familiar parasite that travelled alongside any national disaster story.

No, St. Davids had to be the start, the initial wound from which infection was spreading, and they had survived that. Beyond the borders of the town, somewhere out there in the empty countryside, far enough away to be safe, there would be a quarantine in place, she was sure of it. A military ring thrown over St. Davids as if it were a prize in one of those unwinnable games at fairgrounds. Some prize.

Help was out there. She just had to get to it.

She looked at Jason. Getting to help would be impossible if she had two hundred pounds of dead weight to drag along with her.

She had to bring him back to something like normality.

There was only one thing she could think of: the age-old remedy for a trance-like state of shock that always seemed to work in comedy movies.

It was all she could think of, and doing it made her heart ache, but it had to be done. She wound her arm back and slapped her brother's face with all her might.

Jason's head rocked backwards, and he blinked, his eyes coming to rest on her face.

"We have to go, Jase," Rachel pleaded. "We can't stay here. If the government or whoever has this place hemmed in they'll be forced back here, all those infected people. You understand? We can't stay. Please."

She grabbed his huge, limp hand and pulled. Jason's eyes remained unfocused and distant, and Rachel felt the despair well up inside her again, bubbling toward the surface like destructive lava.

She almost cried with relief when she felt his strong fingers suddenly return her grip.

*

Victor had been right about one thing: the show wasn't quite over. In fact, it had built to a wonderful finale. A pulse-quickening storm of activity. Fireworks.

At no point did Victor allow himself to worry that the mindless monsters stumbling through the woods were aware of his presence, and were in some way hunting him. He knew that wasn't the way they worked. The people, all those flesh and bone pieces of furniture that at one point had housed a supercomputer each, were now just empty-headed animals, operating on sub-human instinct. They were commanded by an imperative in their very DNA, something so fundamental that it was as vital to them as breathing.

External stimuli drew them in as a lit garden would draw insects at night. They had no strategy.

The first of them to stumble across one of his traps, detonating the anti-personnel mine with a deafening roar, merely started a chain reaction that was impossible to stop.

Every bang that shook the dark woods brought more of them toward it, milling around, confused, until another device was triggered. Cause and effect.

Victor had not placed the traps for them, and the careful artistry of the design and layout of his garden of death was wasted on the drooling imbeciles, which was a shame. But it was unlikely now that the SWAT teams he had expected to be killing in his garden would ever come.

Well, more than unlikely, he thought with a sneer.

At least the explosives were not going to waste, as dozens of the sightless critters kept stumbling toward them, the light of their demise illuminating the woods like the flash of a camera. Besides, he would be able to rearm the traps, not that there was likely to be any need.

Still, caution was paramount. It was caution that had gotten him this far, caution and his ability to perceive the intentions and strategies of those who thought themselves above the rest of their species. When the dust of Project Wildfire finally settled, and the rebuilding began, Victor would be able to emerge from his cocoon, forgotten by those who had hunted him previously, and those selfsame attributes would fuel his rise to power.

Their solution to the problem of humanity will make them complacent, he thought. We'll see how they evolve when new problems arise.

Victor had made his way to the surface building that marked the entrance to his bunker. Inside, looking through narrow slits in the brickwork that afforded him a close-up view of the party in the woods, he saw one of the creatures stumble across a mine, and blow apart like pollen in the wind, and he smiled.

*

Michael crept along the apparently empty street. His focus was divided equally between keeping an eye out for the crazed cannibals that had forced St. Davids to its knees, and straining to hear any indication that whoever was following him might have strayed out into the open.

It was clear that it was not one of the infected people that stalked him: already he felt he knew them, and subtlety was not their style. He tried to keep his movements as casual as possible, letting them believe that he proceeded unaware. He didn't look back. Every so often, as he passed an unbroken window he glanced toward it, hoping to catch his follower reflected in the glass, but the lack of light on the street made it unlikely, and he saw nothing.

He was walking down the ironically-named Broad Street, a narrow, claustrophobic road with thin pavements and buildings that seemed to crowd forward, looming over him, as though they were straining to reclaim the road itself.

As he approached the corner at the end of the street, and the right turn into Pembroke Way, he saw his chance. Once around the corner, there was a tiny strip of green land that served as a minuscule park area. Just a few bushes and trees and a couple of park benches. A place for the employees of the town centre's business to stop and eat their lunch. Little more than a garden.

As he turned onto the road, moving out of sight of his pursuer, Michael darted forward suddenly into the dark park, and hunkered down in the closest bush. It didn't provide much cover, and in daylight he would have been easy to spot, but in the dark, with his dark clothing, he had a chance at remaining unseen. He waited, holding his breath.

He heard nothing for several seconds, almost long enough to persuade himself that he had imagined the pursuit. And then, he heard the low murmuring. Whispering. One voice, barely audible.

There were at least two of them, then. Michael carefully slid the tasers out of his pocket, his thumbs resting on the buttons that would shoot the wicked prongs up to fifteen feet.

He focused on the entrance to the park, the narrow gap between the shrubbery. Barely discernible light filtered through the gaps in the bushes, and it was here that Michael first saw movement. A deeper blackness, a silhouette moving along slowly: edging toward him.

"Where'd he go?"

Michael heard the whisper clearly, but didn't hear any response. They had stopped just before the entrance to the park.

Michael gritted his teeth and crept forward, heart hammering painfully in his chest, the beating so loud he was sure it would give him away. When he was close enough, he abandoned stealth and leapt through the park's entrance onto the street, tasers raised.

In front of him stood a slight, pretty girl, about twenty-five years old, and the biggest man Michael had seen in his life.

The woman cried out, holding her hands up to protect her face, and stumbled backwards.

"Don't shoot!"

The giant didn't move, staring through Michael, almost as if unaware of his presence.

"Who are you? Why are you following me?" Michael hissed.

"Nobody!" The woman whispered, sounding shocked. "We just saw you coming out of the police station. You're with the police, right? Is help coming?"

Michael's shoulders slumped, and he lowered the tasers. He recognised them now, or at least he recognised the giant. It had been a couple of years since he last saw Jason Roberts, undertaking an enthusiastic but ultimately unsuccessful trial for the local rugby team. The kid was big then, but clearly hadn't finished growing. Now he was a bear, but there was something curiously absent about his demeanour, something that meant that despite his size, he gave the impression of being not really there.

The girl must be his sister, the one Paula Roberts spoke about so often. Off living the high life in London, working as a lawyer or something. They looked a little alike; despite the very different expressions they wore.

He looked around the street. It was still empty, but that wasn't enough to persuade Michael that it was safe to stop for a street-corner chat.

"Follow me," he whispered.

He led them in silence back to the police station, the only place he could be certain was safe, and after a quick check to make sure nothing nasty had slipped inside while he was away, the trio stepped into the building.

Michael lowered the bar into position once more, locking them safely inside. The girl fidgeted, her fingers in perpetual motion at her side, clutching at the fabric of her jeans, twisting and releasing. She continually cast glances around the small office area, as though expecting something to leap out at her. The giant remained impassive, standing like a statue, the vacant stare drilling deep into Michael's nerves.

Both were covered in blood.

Michael stepped over to the water cooler, and filled a couple of plastic cups with the cool, clear liquid. He handed one to the girl, who nodded gratefully. When the giant didn't acknowledge the cup, Michael placed it on the desk nearest to him.

"It's Rachel, right? Rachel Roberts, and Jason."

Rachel nodded.

"Couldn't fail to recognise the big man. And your mother speaks about you all the time."

Michael saw something in Jason's eyes then, a flicker. Something he couldn't quite identify.

"I'm Michael Evans. Are there more of you? Survivors, I mean?"

Rachel shook her head, and her eyes misted up. She blinked rapidly.

"It's just us. We were hiding on a rooftop during...when the..."

Her voice faded away.

Michael grimaced.

"I saw you, earlier," Rachel said quietly. "On the scooter. That was you, wasn't it?"

In truth, the scooter ride seemed like it had happened to a different person. Now that the chaos of the day seemed to have ended, Michael couldn't quite believe that he had driven a scooter – a fucking scooter! \- into a pack of rabid killers. The memory of it, the glimpses of bodies being torn asunder all around him as he rode, made him shudder.

"Yeah."

"What were you doing?" Rachel asked. "Why weren't you running away?"

Michael stayed silent for a moment. His mind sought for the right approach to take, but there was nothing he could come up with to protect her. Nothing but the truth.

"I'm not sure there's anywhere to run to, Rachel," Michael said, keeping his voice as even as possible. "I came here to try the radio, call for backup, I don't know." He paused. It was information he did not want to deliver.

"There was no response."

Rachel shook her head, as though she couldn't believe it, and for a moment Michael thought she looked very young, like a kid refusing a parent's command to eat their vegetables. It was a startling transformation. Her face, until then, had been hard, her expression forceful.

"I don't believe it," she said.

"Phones are down too," Michael said gently. "I think we're on our own here."

Rachel pursed her lips, and Michael noticed two things: firstly that the poor girl was close to hysteria and doing a good job of keeping a lid on it; and secondly that she had the same steely not-to-be-fucked-with eyes as her mother. Looking at her, at the mental toughness written on her face, he thought he could understand why she had made it through Hell that day.

He glanced again at her brother. Jason didn't carry the same strength in his eyes. Probably never had, Michael thought, given his failure at the rugby. Despite his size, it had been obvious even then that he lacked that killer instinct, the will to dominate the game as his physique suggested he should.

Now though, his eyes were empty and unfocused. He looked lost. Something terrible had happened to Jason, Michael could feel it radiating off him in waves. It was Rachel that had steered them to safety.

Michael lowered his voice, keeping his eye on Jason.

"Is he okay?" He whispered.

"I think he's in shock," Rachel replied, and for the first time Michael heard her voice breaking. "He had to...he was attacked."

Michael nodded. Now was not the time.  After a moment, he wheeled the desk chairs out into the middle of room, and motioned for Rachel to sit. She guided Jason gently into a chair, which creaked under his weight, and then sat opposite Michael.

"Do you know what happened?" She asked hesitantly.

Michael shook his head.

"I think it's a virus. Something that...drives people mad, I don't know. It's in the blood I guess, transferred when they...bite."

Rachel nodded.

"We were on the street, heading for the explosion. Everybody walking together. It happened so fast, the way they just kept coming. Could a virus take hold so quickly?"

"Honestly, I don't know," Michael said. "This morning, there was someone in the woods, a guy who seemed to know what was going on. I think this was all planned somehow."

"Like a terrorist attack?"

Michael shrugged.

"Could be. Maybe. Whatever it is, I think it's man-made."

"So what do we do now?" Rachel asked.

Michael couldn't help but be impressed. Most people, he was certain, would have dissolved into hysteria having suffered through the kind of day Rachel must have just been subjected to.

"Like I said, I don't think help is coming. At least not for a while, if ever. If this thing has spread further, across the country...well, let's just say I don't think waiting is an option."

Rachel nodded.

"So," Michael continued. "My only plan at the moment is to find the guy in the woods and see what he knows. I figure that if we stumble around without a clear idea of what we're dealing with our luck won't hold for long.

"That's where I was heading when I ran into you."

He looked at Jason again.

"Maybe you and Jason should stay here. You can lock yourselves in, and I'll come back for you when I find out what's going on."

Rachel shook her head deliberately.

"We're coming with you. I've had enough of hiding and waiting to die for one day. "

"What about Jason?"

"Jason will be fine," she said firmly, and placed her small hand on her brother's giant paw. "He just needs...a little time that's all. But he'll be okay. You think they're all gone? The infected people I mean."

Michael scratched his chin absent-mindedly. Stubble had sprung out across his jaw. The normality of it was suddenly jarring.

"I haven't seen any, and the town seems quiet. They make a lot of noise. They're all blind, but it seems like they can hear very well. Smell too, I think. So I'd guess they're moving away from St. Davids, seeking out other prey. I know where we can get a car, not far from here. It should be safe, I think."

Rachel set her jaw, and fixed Michael with a determined stare, as if challenging him.

"Then let's go."

# Chapter 10

Michael led Rachel and Jason to Glenda's driveway without further incident. The streets were as quiet as they were traumatising: blood and dead bodies were scattered on the ground at regular intervals, with the latter contorted, twisted into violent depictions of the last moments of their lives. The sights saddened Michael – he would never have imagined that the friendly, neighbourly residents of St. Davids would meet such grisly ends - even as he felt himself developing a tolerance to the impact of their brutality.

Amazing, he thought, how quickly the human mind can adapt to deal with trauma, and render the horrific mundane. Then he caught sight of Jason's haunted expression, as Rachel led him forward by the hand. Not for everybody, he thought sadly.

The big man moved like a shadow, trailing Rachel, and his passing seemed hardly to disturb even the air around him. He needed help soon, Michael thought, and wondered if there was anyone left out there for whom mental instability would be deemed anything other than a frivolous irrelevance.

He shook the thought away, quickly, for it reminded him of his father, and told himself that things couldn't possibly be as bad as his worst fears tried to persuade him they were.

Rachel studied Michael slyly as they walked. He didn't talk, but the silence was not awkward: she welcomed it in fact, for it gave her time to gather her reeling senses. The policeman moved a little gingerly, and she puzzled over this for a while until she saw him clutching at his side when he thought she wasn't looking.

He's injured, she thought, and once the realisation took root, she noticed the limp he was trying to suppress, and the swollen jaw that looked as if it had connected with the wrong end of a cricket bat. Michael was trying to protect her, Rachel realised, trying to give her something that would make her feel safe, some semblance of authority, and she appreciated the gesture.

He was a good looking man, and she was amazed to find, somewhere deep within herself, faint sparks of attraction for him.

The thought shamed her, and she turned her attention to Jason, who needed her to remain focused and unselfish right now. She buried the thought of Michael deep down.

When they reached the car, a cheerful red Renault Clio that seemed oddly out of place amongst the horror in the town, Michael produced a single key from a breast pocket, and unlocked it.

The car beeped loudly, indicator lights flashing twice as the central locking acknowledged the wake-up call. The sound, unnervingly loud in the quiet night, made Rachel jump, and both she and Michael tensed, sweeping their eyes around the street.

The windows remained as dark as the others that they had passed en route. If there were any living souls left in the houses of St. Davids, they were staying out of sight. Rachel didn't blame them.

They eased Jason's massive frame into the rear seat. Rachel moved her seat as far forward as it would go to give him some leg room, but he still looked awkward, like a man trying on clothes five sizes too small. It would have to do.

She slipped into the passenger seat next to Michael, and they both shut their doors softly.

"How far is it?" Rachel asked once they were inside.

"Not far," Michael replied. "A few miles. On the coastal road, near Ralf's café."

Rachel noticed the tone of his voice drop as he said the words.

"It's out in the woods though, and I'm not certain I'll be able to find it again."

Michael turned and looked into Rachel's eyes. She felt a fluttering in her stomach despite herself, and told it to be quiet.

"It's not too late for you to go back. I can drive you. This guy I'm looking for, he's...well, I think he's dangerous. Unstable. He sure gave me that impression anyway."

Michael rubbed his swollen jaw absent-mindedly.

"Dangerous and unstable, huh," Rachel muttered, and she cast her eyes back on the bloodsoaked road they had just walked and forced a sardonic grin.

Michael nodded.

"Understood," he said, and turned the ignition over. The car started with a soft purr, and Michael set off, moving slowly and keeping tense eyes on the arc of light thrown out by the headlamps, heading back to where it had all begun, several hours and hundreds of lives earlier.

*

The emptiness of the road was spooking Michael. He had told himself that the streets of St. Davids were empty because there was nothing left in them to kill, but he had expected to encounter more of the Infected out here in the country, stumbling around the woods; directionless.

So far, though: nothing.

He felt his emotions beginning to spiral again, felt the lid that he had kept so firmly in place for years working its way loose. He knew from experience that he had to occupy his mind, had to suppress it, before the darkness took over.

He coughed.

"So, uh, you live in London?"

Rachel looked at him, surprised.

"Your mother," he said by way of explanation. "She never failed to mention her little girl conquering the capital, hanging out with the bigwigs."

Rachel snorted.

"It wasn't quite like that. I thought it would be, but it was more like making coffees and trying to make sure that it was only the boss' eyes that got near my arse."

She flushed.

"I am...I was, coming home to live. Just for a while, until I worked out what to do next."

The words made a heavy silence fall in the car again. They were both, Rachel realised suddenly, wondering if there would be a 'next' and just what form it might take.

"Jason came back to visit. My father's birthday, tomorrow. He's...gone now."

Michael glanced to his left. Tears were running down Rachel's cheek unnoticed, her eyes, strong and clear, focused only on the winding road ahead.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For you both."

Rachel nodded curtly.

Michael studied the rear view mirror. Jason was staring blankly at the back of Rachel's seat.

"I'm glad he didn't get to see this," Rachel said. "He wouldn't have understood."

"Is your mother-"

"Dead," Rachel said, her tone informing Michael in no uncertain terms that the subject was closed.

"And you? Do you have a family here?"

Michael shook his head.

"Wife and daughter in Aberystwyth. They left a couple of years back. I think they are..."

Michael trailed off. He was looking in the rear view mirror again. Behind Jason's head, out there in the darkness, something about the road behind them looked...off. He frowned.

What is that?

He checked the road ahead – all clear – and slowed a little, raising his foot a fraction from the accelerator. The road behind them looked blurry and indistinct, like a painting in which the colours were running, slowly seeping down the canvas.

He squinted, trying to make it out, and then he noticed the same blurring creeping up the windows from the rear, as though trying to overtake the car.

Instinctively, he tapped quickly on the brake pedal for a split second, and illuminated the road behind them in the red glow of the brake lights.

His mouth dropped.

Dozens of them, bathed in crimson as though they had burst straight from hell itself, loping in the tiny hatchback's wake like dogs. A swarming, heaving mass of shadows that blotted out the road, making the trees that lined it seem alive.

Infected.

Michael gasped and stamped on the accelerator wildly, all thoughts of proceeding with caution abandoned. As his gaze swung back to the road ahead, Rachel screamed in the passenger seat, her hands held out ahead of her face protectively.

Heading straight for them, an oblivious participant in a deadly game of chicken, was Derek Graham, the town butcher, drenched in blood, the lights of the car disappearing into his vacant, glistening eye-sockets. His mouth was split by a wide, hungry grin, displaying a set of blood-red teeth.

Michael tried to spin the wheel, but too late. The butcher ran straight into the radiator grille as if it were nothing more threatening than a garden sprinkler, and disappeared in a cloud of blood that filled the windscreen.

The car lurched as it bumped wildly over the body, and the wheel slipped from Michael's grasp. The world seemed to hold its breath for a fleeting second as the car flipped, and Michael had time to see the tarmac rushing toward the driver side window before everything became twisting, shrieking metal, and darkness.

*

Rat-a-tat-a-tat

Rat-a-tat-a-tat

Michael groaned, struggling to break himself free of oblivion, swimming against the insistent current that pulled him down inexorably.

Someone was at the door. Why wasn't Elise answering the damn door?

Rat-a-tat-a-tat

He struggled to open his eyes. They seemed glued together somehow, as if the lids had fused together. My God, how much did I have to drink?

Rat-a-tat-a-tat

Finally, his left eye opened, his vision swimming alarmingly, lurching, as though he were lying on a storm-tossed boat, not in his own bed.

And it was dark! Still pitch black. Who on earth was hammering on their door at this hour?

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a

"Elise?" He tried to slur, but the words came out as a thick, gloopy moan.

And then a face was above him, a woman's face. Not Elise. The woman leaned close, shouting. Words he couldn't make out.

The darkness crept up and curled itself around him, pulling him back down into the depths, submerging him.

# Chapter 11

"He's waking up! I think he's waking up! Michael, can you hear me?"

A woman's voice. Elise? No, Elise was gone.

"Take it easy, Michael. Slowly, okay? You're safe."

Safe from what? His head was a deep, unending abyss of pain. Opening his eyes, he was sure, would only make it worse.

Had he been in an accident? Why hadn't they treated his pain?

He was lying on his back, his head resting on a cool pillow. Something else rose to the top of his list of priorities, something more urgent than the pain. Water. His throat felt like a sun-baked desert.

"Water," he tried to say, but the word emerged as a dusty croak.

The woman seemed to understand, for a moment later he felt a soft hand slide carefully under the back of his head, inclining it ever so slightly.

Something touched his cracked lips and then the water cascaded down his throat, ice-cold; the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.

At last he opened an eye, just a crack. Bright light flooded his brain, slowly resolving into the face of a young woman, her face hovering a few inches over his. She was young, dark-haired, her grey eyes heavy with concern. She looked familiar.

Michael struggled to find his memories, felt them out there somewhere, hiding beneath layers of pain.

A name surfaced. Rachel.

The memories came back then, like a jolt of electricity. St. Davids. Death and chaos. The car flipping, the road rushing up to meet him.

"Rachel," he wheezed.

A smile of pure relief broke out across Rachel's face.

"You remember," she said.

Michael tried to nod, but the effort made him see stars.

"Where are we?"

"We're safe, Michael. The man in the woods, the one you were looking for, he saved us. They can't get to us here. You need to rest, okay? Just focus on getting better."

Michael let his eyes close again, the pain and all-encompassing weariness inviting him back into the darkness.

The man in the woods had saved them. Michael thought the words sounded familiar, but fog had descended on his mind, obscuring everything.

As he drifted away into unconsciousness once more, his final thought was a question: why did the mention of the man in the woods, the one who had apparently saved them, awaken such worry deep inside him?

Darkness.

*

Rachel felt tears sting her eyes. She barely knew the man that lay bandaged and broken on the narrow bed in front of her, but the powerful rush of emotion she felt on seeing him break out of the comatose condition he had been in for days told her just how much she had riding on him. The realisation made her feel scared and isolated.

She had known there was something wrong with the man who had saved them almost immediately, had seen the look of disdain cross his face when she had insisted, after the last of the infected horrors had been mown down by the man's machine gun, that they must carry Michael's inert body with them through the woods. It was an oddly childish look; the pout of a teenager who'd been instructed to do something he felt was pointless.

Rachel had hunted through the wreckage of the car, and got lucky: there had been some camping equipment in the boot, and she was able to turn a groundsheet into a makeshift stretcher. The man with the gun had begrudgingly helped her extricate Michael from the wreckage and onto the stretcher, before lifting him roughly.

Rachel grimaced. If Michael had any spinal injuries, hauling him through the woods in this manner were certain to exacerbate them, but she didn't see any alternative. Jason's strength would have helped in the task, but Jason, having rolled out of the wrecked car with no more than cuts and bruises, was lost, staring dumbly at the broken bodies of the people the man had gunned down.

The man with the gun had a place. Deep in the woods. A place they would be safe. It was as he had said these words to her, as something in his eyes sparkled unnervingly when he said the word safe that Rachel felt concern growing inside her that the new world might hold more dangers than roaming packs of the Infected.

The 'place' he had described, at which they had arrived after a gruesome trip through a forest riddled with bodies, turned out to be even more bizarre, and troubling. A ramshackle outhouse, built to encase a hatch in the floor that opened when the man punched a code into a discreetly-placed keypad. A ladder leading down, into a world of concrete and fluorescent lights glinting off metal.

They had heaved the unconscious Michael down with a great deal of trouble, twisting his body awkwardly in the narrow space. Every time Rachel, clutching onto the sheet that they had wrapped him in, felt a bump against the walls of the shaft, she gritted her teeth. Once Michael was down, laid on the floor below, Rachel resurfaced to persuade Jason, who stood above staring at nothing in particular, to navigate the ladder. She had seen the man with the gun sneak a few glances at her brother. He had looked intrigued at first, and then, as Rachel had gently coaxed Jason to follow them through the woods she had seen something else. An odd look of satisfaction that unnerved her for reasons she couldn't quite identify.

Once they were all inside the strange bunker, sealed in by the closing of the hatch, Rachel took off her coat and bundled it under Michael's head. The man's face: a patchwork of scratches old and new, was deathly pale. She leaned in close, her ear hovering inches above his mouth. His breathing seemed steady, if shallow.

When she rose to her feet, she found the man with the gun standing in front of her, hand outstretched, face cracked in a grin.

"Victor," he said pleasantly.

Rachel took the hand and shook it. It felt cold and limp in hers.

"I'm Rachel. That's my brother Jason. This is Michael."

She motioned to the man laid on the floor. Victor nodded, looking slightly disinterested.

"Thank you for helping us. I don't know what we would have done-"

"Think nothing of it."

Victor waved a dismissive hand.

 "We need to stick together don't we? Those of us that haven't become...them."

Rachel nodded.

"What were you doing out there in the woods?"

"Clearing my land," Victor said with a sniff. "They had been converging on this place for a couple of hours. No real threat to getting in here of course – we're perfectly safe down here," he looked earnestly into Rachel's eyes, "but the thought of them milling around so close was making me...uncomfortable. I saw a group of them break away and head for the road. Heard your car, I suppose."

Rachel nodded again.

"Is there somewhere we can put Michael? A bed? Do you have any medical supplies here?"

"Of course."

Victor seemed offended by the question.

"There is a bed, on the lower level. We'll take him there, and then I can give you the grand tour."

Victor beamed, but the smile never reached his eyes. Rachel felt her skin crawl looking into those two vacant pools. Internal alarms began to sound, and she resolved to get away from this man and his strange underground prison at the first opportunity.

*

Once Michael was safely stowed on a narrow bed in what looked like a large storage closet, and Victor reassured her that his pulse was strong and steady, Rachel allowed herself to focus more on her surroundings. They stood in what Victor claimed was the lowest level of his underground fortress: two large rectangular concrete rooms that had an industrial feel, like a storage shed.

The impression was reinforced by shelves lining the walls, packed floor to ceiling with food and supplies.

"Enough to sustain a single person thirty months without resupply," Victor said, noting her stare. "Not exactly Cordon Bleu, but everything the human body needs to survive for an extended period."

Rachel scanned the shelves: powdered milk in enormous sacks, vast quantites of rice, hundreds of cans of fruit and vegetables. Her eyes fell on the rectangular space in the centre of the larger of the two rooms. In it sat a battered armchair alongside a low concrete construction covered with a sheet of plywood. Her brow furrowed.

"The crowning glory," Victor said smugly. "Under that sheet is a seven hundred foot well shaft drilled down to an aquifer."

Rachel glanced at him, confused.

"An endless supply of fresh water." Victor's face broke into another unsettling grin.

"Ah," Rachel said, and noticed his expression darken from the corner of her eye. Something about the way he was describing his hideout made her think of a young child proudly showing a chaotic drawing to its parents.

She noticed, on the far wall, partially obscured behind a stack of cardboard boxes, a wall safe. Noticed too that Victor did not mention it.

Victor pointed to the narrow concrete steps that led to the floor above.

"Shall we?"

Rachel glanced at Jason. The big man was standing just inside the larger of the two rooms on the basement level, lost in his thoughts, eyes clouded. Gently, she grasped his hand and led him to the battered armchair, easing him into it. He sat wordlessly, his massive bulk filling the chair, his eyes coming to rest on the well in front of him.

"I'll be back soon, okay Jase?"

Jason remained silent.

Rachel turned and followed Victor to the steps, listening to the flat echo of her steps as she ascended.

"Your brother," Victor said. "Is he..?"

"He's just in shock," Rachel said flatly.

Victor nodded thoughtfully.

The next floor up, the middle of the three, was again divided in two. In the main space there were a few items of exercise equipment: an ancient-looking treadmill, exercise bike and rowing machine, along with some weights. To Rachel's right, the second part of the space was sealed off by a closed door.

"That's my little control room," Victor said. "Controls for the heating and lighting, and some monitors. I've got CCTV cameras set up around the perimeter. Place like this needs an early warning system."

"Early warning of what?"

"Anything. If there are people above trying to get in, you're better off knowing about it before they come through the front door. Fire, radiation. Having eyes on the ouside world without exposing yourself is a necessity."

"Looks like you're planning to survive a nuclear war or something. Why did you build this place?"

Victor paused for a moment.

"I'm the only one allowed in there," he said stiffly, and strode toward the next set of steps.

Rachel followed, with a growing sense of unease.

The top floor comprised of living quarters: a spacious living room and kitchen and separate bathroom and bedroom, all furnished nicely. Only the knowledge that the rooms were part of an underground tomb altered the impression of an interior of a normal house or apartment.

The entire structure, Victor proudly informed her, totalled around 2,100 square feet. From his tone, Rachel presumed this was an impressive statistic.

She was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, half wondering how comfortable the couch would be, and tuning out Victor's rambling about the construction of the bunker, and how he had found a company in America that specialised in such buildings following the terror attacks of 2001 and the subsequent panic.

Lost in her thoughts, it took her a moment to realise that Victor had stopped talking. When the sudden silence alerted her to the change in Victor, she had time only to curse her stupidity at being so easily separated from her brother and Michael before something heavy and solid crashed into the back of her head, and the lights went out.

*

When Michael broke the surface again, his eyes opened more easily. The pain was still there, an orchestra of it: wood, wind, brass and strings playing a bombastic melody, but at least he found himself able to focus his thoughts.

It took him a moment to remember Rachel, to remember her words to him.

The man in the woods had saved them.

Alarm bells rang in Michael's head, briefly muting the chorus. The man in the woods was not to be trusted. He cursed himself for not telling Rachel more when he had the chance, for warning her, letting her know how his first encounter with the hooded man had gone. There just hadn't seemed to be the time.

It was dark in the room, which was almost featureless. Low ceiling, very little furniture other than the bed he now laid on. No windows. The air smelled stale and musty, heavy with the stink of sweat that he presumed belonged to him, but also a smell much older, more ingrained. As though the room hadn't received fresh air for a very long time.

He couldn't hear anything beyond the walls of the small room. It must be night time. They were asleep.

He struggled on the bed, tried to find the strength to lift himself upright. He was defenceless here; vulnerable.

The effort exhausted him, and the lure of sleep proved too irresistible.

Again he drifted away from consciousness, and again his final thought was one that planted seeds of concern, seeds that took root immediately and began to grow, dominating his fevered dreams.

Why couldn't I feel my legs?

*

Blood.

Filling her nose and mouth with a bitter metallic taste; riding her hacking cough like an unbroken horse.

Rachel forced open her eyes painfully, and when she saw what he had done to her body, closed them again and prayed for oblivion to reclaim her.

She was tied, naked, to his bed. Every inch of her body that she could see from her awkward angle was covered in bruises and long, shallow cuts that interconnected across her, forming a map of Victor's insanity.

She had struggled for the first hour, had even tried screaming for help at one point, though she knew none would come. He had stuffed her mouth with his filthy underwear then, silencing her, making the bile surge in her gut. Eventually, when it was clear that there was to be no fantasy rescue from the horror Victor was determined to inflict on her, she tried to follow Jason's example, attempted to submerge her consciousness and detach herself from the horror. It worked to the extent that Rachel was able to tune out some of the pain – or maybe just to become acclimatised to it – but she could not tune out the indignity, and it fuelled a burning, destructive rage inside her.

Rachel had no idea how long she had been tied to the bed – at least, not in hours. Time was now measured in her 'sessions' with Victor. Three times he had entered the bedroom: each time carrying some object that she quickly learned was to be inserted into her.

Each time, before the violence began, Victor would rant at her, rising in pitch like an evangelist, working himself up into a state of blind anger that seemed to be required in order for the torture to start. Always, the focus of his rants was what he called her 'education', the lessons she would learn before he could safely release her and put her to work.

She heard the bedroom door open, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, praying that the man entering the room would be Michael or Jason, but she knew immediately that hope was futile from the ragged, eager breathing.

When she dared to look, she saw Victor, a dark silhouette, naked and leering. Clutching a broken bottle in his right hand.

"Time to learn."

*

It was the smell that woke him up a third time, a delicious salty aroma that writhed on the air like an exotic dancer, teasing him, inviting him forward.

His eyes opened. Daylight.

Nearby, he could hear the sound of cooking. The smell of the eggs, doused with pepper and salt made his mouth water and his stomach cramp.

"Hello?" Michael called out feebly.

He heard a clang, and moments later Rachel appeared in the open doorway, smiling coldly.

"You're awake," she said. "Hungry?"

Michael nodded, noting that the pain had backed off a little. It was still there, stalking him at a distance, watching like a cat, but he found at least it was manageable.

Rachel disappeared, returning with a plate heaped with scrambled eggs and some bread.

"Victor made a run to town," she said. "He was pretty excited by the eggs. I think you'll be seeing a lot of them."

She smiled again, but Michael noticed that the smile was not reflected in her eyes.

Michael reached for the plate, groaning a little as the pain stalked closer.

"Careful," Rachel said, her voice full of concern. "We think you've got a broken arm. Your shoulder was dislocated too, but Victor popped it back in while you were out."

Her nose wrinkled a little with distaste, as if remembering the sound of it.

"Here, let me do it."

Rachel sat next to the bed in a small wooden chair, and began to scoop the eggs up with a fork, guiding them toward his mouth.

It embarrassed Michael, to be fed like a toddler, but the gnawing hunger pushed the shame away, and he took the eggs into his mouth gratefully, chewing vigorously and ignoring the pain when he swallowed. It was the best food he had ever eaten.

He ate in silence awhile, letting his thoughts gather, feeling as if his mind were a jigsaw assembling itself slowly.

"I can't feel my legs, Rachel," he said finally, and he knew from the falling of her face, the way her eyes suddenly refused to meet his. Knew even before she spoke.

"When...we crashed into the tree, a piece of a branch was in your lower back. Victor took it out. He said it wasn't life threatening, but there was a good chance that..."

Her voice trailed off, as if speaking the words would make it real.

Michael focused all his thoughts, all his energy on his feet, trying to move them, even to wiggle a toe, but there was nothing, not even a feeling of dead weight, just...an absence that began at his waist.

"I'm paralysed," he said flatly.

Saying the words was a curious business. Michael, at least the Michael who had existed before St. Davids erupted in mindless violence, would have met such news with unyielding black despair, a consuming fear and anxiety that would have slowly destroyed him. Paralysis. The latest instance of bad luck in a life full of it.

Instead, he felt oddly detached from it. The news that he was paralysed reached him as might news that it was raining outside, or that today was Tuesday.

Maybe I'm just in shock, Michael thought. Maybe when it sinks in, it will do so under the weight of a mountain of despair.

It didn't feel like that to Michael, though. Something inside felt different, something that told him that a life without legs was better than no life at all. For a man used to pessimism, the change was startling. For now, he decided, it was best not to dwell on it.

He swallowed a final mouthful of the eggs, and shook his head slowly when Rachel moved to get another forkful.

"Tell me what happened," Michael said. "Tell me about Victor."

Rachel's expression darkened, her eyes losing focus.

"We're in his house, well, his...bunker I suppose you'd call it. Most of it's underground, that's where we are now. They can't get to us down here. He was in the woods that night. He said they, the Infected, he calls them, had been attacking his land for hours, and he was out driving them back when he saw us, saw them chasing us.

"He's got guns, Michael. Explosives too. It's like a fortress here. It's a place we can stay and be...safe."

Michael nodded slowly, understanding. Rachel's words said one thing, her tone and stiff body language another. She sounded as if she were reciting some practised script.

"Did he say why he has this place?"

Rachel shook her head, and stood, preparing to leave.

"He's got cameras everywhere, Michael, watching everything. So...you know, if you need anything, he'll see."

Her words were pointed, the subtext not lost on him.

Michael nodded his understanding, fixing her eyes with a meaningful look.

"I understand," he said. "Can I talk to him?"

Rachel nodded.

"I should let you get some rest. I'll tell Victor you asked for him."

She turned to leave.

"Wait," Michael said. "What about Jason?"

Her head dropped a little as she turned back to face him.

"Is he here?"

"Yes," she replied. She pointed at the open doorway.

Michael lifted his head a little. Through the open door he could see into the next room. Jason's massive frame filled a too-small-for-him armchair that faced away from Michael. He looked oddly serene sitting there, unmoving.

When Rachel spoke next, her voice cracked with emotion.

"He's done nothing but sit there since we got here. He hasn't spoken; he doesn't seem to hear anything. It's like he doesn't even know we are here."

The sadness in her voice made Michael's heart ache, and he understood then. Understood that she was putting a brave face on the situation for Jason, and for himself. Understood that her dedication to Michael's health stemmed from the fact that there was nothing she could do for Jason.

Michael's body was broken, and there were at least things Rachel could do to help that. Jason's injury was ethereal, intangible, and he saw the helplessness she felt written clearly in her eyes.

And something else. Terror. Hidden well, but definitely there. Michael thought of the careful neutrality she exuded, the claims that they were safe, and realised there was only one thing here to be afraid of.

Victor.

"How long have we been here Rachel? How long have I been unconscious?"

Rachel's head dropped, as though she didn't want to think about it.

"Five days," she said, her voice flat and featureless as a becalmed ocean.

Michael reached out to comfort her, his fingers landing lightly on her forearm.

She flinched, tears filling her eyes, and then hurried from the room without a word.

Michael looked at Jason for a moment, sitting stock still, facing a wall, and was reminded of visits to his ancient grandmother at a home for the elderly, and the way she stared at nothing in particular, locked away in her memories.

Then he let his head drop back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling, trying not to think about what could have happened in those five days to turn the strong, focused woman he had met in the midst of chaos into the guarded, fearful person that had just left the room.

*

In the narrow kitchen, Rachel scrubbed the plate clean of the eggs, polishing it until it looked new.

With each passing night that Michael had remained unconscious, she had prayed that Victor's prognosis that the policeman would be paralysed would not come to pass.

When Michael had told her that he couldn't feel his legs, she had felt her spirit break. Jason was unreachable, and, sitting in his chair night after night, remained oblivious to what happened each evening on the floor above. She didn't know whether the sound of it, the gasping, sneering violence in the locked room even made it down through the floor, or whether Jason's ears were simply closed off forever.

Neither Michael nor Jason could help her. It was just her and the lunatic who spoke in different accents, words that sounded like dialogue from bad action movies. The lunatic with the guns.

Suddenly, she felt so alone, so hopeless, that she wanted to cry, but already she had been made painfully aware that every inch of the bunker was monitored and recorded, and Victor's retribution would be swift and brutal.

She scrubbed until her arm ached, and the skin of her palm was raw with the friction, stopping only when she heard the hatch that led to the outside opening above her head, the hatch that separated the hell above from the hell below.

*

Victor had spent hours rearming the traps, setting up hair-fine tripwires and pressure plates, using up almost all of the explosives he had stored on the basement level of the bunker.

When he was satisfied that the area was secure, he set off for the bunker again feeling exhausted and happy.

He couldn't really explain to himself just why he had gone to the aid of the people tumbling around in the crashing car that night, but to say it had paid off was an understatement.

The long years of solitude had practically neutered him, driving away all of his baser desires for the company of women, but finding one in such distress on his very doorstep, a pretty young thing so vulnerable, so powerless to refuse his advances, had awakened a monumental sleeping hunger inside him, and now the passing hours were marked with that delicious, rapacious appetite growing until it ached inside him, secure in the knowledge that it would be satisfied.

She had resisted that first night, displaying a spirit he found admirable, if futile, until Victor had levelled the gun at the back of her retard brother's meaty head. She'd broken then. A delicious fracturing of her psyche that Victor could almost taste, and that made his groin ache every time he thought about it.

Finding the cop with them had been almost even better. Victor had been distracted by the mindless herd attacking his home, and had presumed the policeman dead, so discovering that he had carried on the adventure, recording it all for Victor to savour at a later date, was like a fine dessert after a mouthwatering meal.

When Victor had discovered the policeman's change of uniform, and the subsequent loss of the micro-camera, his rage had been primordial, and he had made sure the girl paid the price.

Now, the policeman was simply leverage. It was obvious the girl cared for him somehow, obvious that if ever threats on the brother proved less than persuasive, threats on the cripple would do the job nicely. And besides, he had found something in the policeman's uniform pocket that excited him enormously, something that, if he was right about it, would be worth keeping and showing to the man. One final act in the policeman's drama before Victor finally decided to remove him from the equation.

They were, Victor thought as he returned to his home, like a marvellous little family, a family of obedient little children, all ready to please the master of the house in one way or another.

As Victor approached the hatch, he felt his cock twitching in anticipation. The little bitch would be pleasing the master of the house soon enough. Maybe he'd even move the action down to what had become the hospital wing of his little house, and get her to please him right in front of her idiot brother.

Victor snorted, and opened the hatch that was hidden under a pile of refuse in the squat surface building, and descended the ladder, locking it again from the inside.

The day's work is done, he thought excitedly.

Playtime.

# Chapter 12

Michael had lain in silence for hours, trying desperately to think of ways that he might be able to escape the situation in which he now found himself.

A couple of times, he had tried to call out to Jason, but the big man's head didn't even move.

Rachel, evidently, was on another floor, out of earshot. Michael wondered how big this place could be, and just what would drive a man to build himself an underground prison in the middle of nowhere.

He thought back to his meeting with the man in the woods, the man he was certain was the Victor that Rachel had spoken of, remembering the wild, unhinged look in his eyes when he had removed the hood, and shivered.

He spent a while fruitlessly searching for sleep, and then he heard the footsteps approaching, and stared at the open doorway, suddenly wide awake.

Rachel appeared there. Her head was bowed, but Michael could see the blackening eye, the swollen, bloodied lip, and a cold fury filled him.

Behind her, another figure appeared. The man from the woods. Victor. As Michael watched, eyes narrowing, Victor slid his hands around Rachel's waist. Rachel tried – and failed - to suppress a flinch.

"Why don't you go back upstairs, my dear," Victor drawled amiably. "I'd like to have a little discussion with our friend here."

Rachel turned without a word, and shuffled away, her eyes never leaving the floor. Victor watched her leave, and when Michael heard a door closing distantly, he found the man's psychotic eyes returning to his own, drilling into them.

"Hello, Michael," Victor said warmly, and Michael noticed that the odd Germanic accent he had used when they first met had now vanished, replaced with nothing at all, a flat, controlled tone that revealed nothing about where Victor was from.

"How are you feeling? You had us all worried, you know."

Victor strolled to the chair by the bed, and sat in it languidly. He affected a babyish pout, a mockery of concern.

"Not as badly as I might have expected, in the care of a lunatic," Michael replied coldly.

Victor's eyes darkened.

"I don't think that's any way to talk to the man who holds power over whether you live or die is it Michael?"

Michael sneered.

"You think you're some kind of god down here, hiding out like a coward?"

Victor flinched, just a little. After a moment he visibly relaxed, and forced a laugh: a mean, mirthless sound.

"A god is precisely what I am now Michael. What is a god, do you think? I think it's just a symbol of power, and in the brave new world taking shape above our heads, I think I'm going to appear very powerful indeed."

Michael eyes narrowed, as if trying to hold in the pressure of the frustration building behind them.

"What do you know about it, what's going on out there?" He snarled.

Victor smiled serenely.

"Apt that you should bring God into this Michael, for I believe our divine maker" – the words came out laced with contempt – "is at the very heart of this. People, after all, are ruled by fear in one way or another. It is fear that makes us all toe the line. Fear of retribution, in this life or the next. That was a very nice touch. That certainly gave the notion of God some...longevity."

Michael's brow wrinkled. Victor's rambling was becoming more and more incoherent, even as the man himself became more animated, losing his grip on the steely control with which he tried to conduct himself.

"The trouble with God is that now there are just too damn many of us, and increasingly people are wondering: where the hell are all the miracles? And once people start to question it..."

Victor shrugged, as if his conclusion was obvious.

"You're insane," Michael spat bitterly.

Victor shrugged, and flashed a benevolent smile.

"So you keep saying. But it's all relative, isn't it Michael? We're only as sane as the world allows us to be. Am I any less sane than the majority? The unthinking herds that now wander the land above us, killing each other with their teeth? Am I less sane than that retard in the next room, trying to find answers in the peeling wallpaper? Less sane than you? You speak of sanity in the same way drooling idiots speak - spoke - of God, as if it is some cornerstone of your humanity, some treasure that you can hoard. Have you learned nothing? The sanity of humans is a veil of lies, and that veil has now been lifted. We're animals, Michael, you, me; everyone. Creatures of instinct, born in violence. What is happening up there is no disaster, it is an epiphany."

"You did this," Michael said. "I don't know how, but you're involved. You have turned your own species into rabid dogs, not me, so: yes, you are the one who's insane."

"You are sane because you are allowed to be Michael," Victor said, his eyes glittering dangerously. "Because I am allowing you to be. Remember that. But alas, you are wrong: this is not my doing, at least not entirely. I was merely a cog in a much greater machine. The difference between us, Michael, is that I was blessed with enough intelligence to notice when the wind changed direction, while you were merely carried along by it."

"So let's see how your sanity holds up shall we?" Victor said casually, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a piece of paper.

Michael squinted at it, and felt his heart lurch painfully.

A small, folded square of paper, emblazoned with his name in Glenda the receptionist's spidery handwriting.

"You didn't find the time to read this Michael? I thought not. Allow me to read it for you: 'Michael, the call came over the radio while you were gone. I tried to reach you but the phones are down and I can't raise you on the radio. It's a message from Aberystwyth PD. They said paramedics have been called out to your wife, she had something wrong with her eyes. Your daughter is missing. They want you to call them urgently. Glenda.'"

 Michael's world collapsed. His worst fears were realised. St. Davids wasn't the start of anything. Just a town like any other. The virus was not a dam breaking in this town, it was a tsunami. There was nothing to stop it.

No...Claire...

Victor saw the realisation spreading across Michael's face, and giggled.

Michael struggled to sit up, grasping feebly toward Victor's throat. Victor leaned back, evading him easily, and laughed.

"There it is Michael, you see? The animal inside, simmering below the surface. You'd kill me now if you had the chance, and you wouldn't even realise as you choked the life out of me, that you were simply confirming that I am right, and you are lost. Are you struggling to save yourself? The girl upstairs who humbles herself every night to meet my needs? Your daughter? The world?"

He cackled.

"The world you knew is gone Michael, and it is not coming back. The decision was taken long ago, the outcome decided before you or anyone else was even aware there was an argument to be had."

"You see, Michael," Victor said, leaning closer. "The virus is in all of us now. We've been breathing it in for years, and it has lain dormant, waiting for someone to push the button and activate it. You're one of the lucky ones, and you know why? Because of me. Because the virus spares only those with my blood type, and because I designed the fucking button for them. You live because of me, as do all the others."

Victor stood, and walked to the doorway, turning back to fix Michael with a smug grin.

"So, Michael, tell me, how am I any different to God?"

Michael laughed coldly.

"The difference, Victor, is that a real God would know what was standing behind him."

Confusion passed across Victor's face, and then his eyes widened in fear.

Before he could turn, Jason's massive fingers curled around his neck, gripped him like a steel vice, and began to choke the life out of him.

"Jason, wait!" Michael yelled, and locked his gaze onto Victor's bulging eyes.

"Is there an antidote to this, can it be reversed?"

Victor grinned.

"Fuck you."

Michael's head dropped in despair. He didn't see Victor die, but he heard it, the crunching, snapping of the man's neck as Jason's massive hands closed inexorably.

When Michael looked up, Jason was standing over him, one hand outstretched. Jason's eyes, once boyish and then utterly empty, were now filled with something else, bottomless pools of rage that sent a shudder through Michael. When he spoke, his voice was flat. It sounded like steel.

"Let's go and find your daughter."

# Epilogue

It took the battered trio a long time to make their way from Victor's bunker, carefully picking their way, avoiding tripwires, testing every inch of ground before they deemed it safe to step on, moving slowly until they were sure they had cleared the perimeter.

Rachel and Jason had suggested that they should go, and return to Michael once they had gathered what they needed, but Michael had refused. The new world was not a place that would take care of him, but a place he needed to meet head-on.

Jason carried Michael on his broad shoulders until they reached St. Davids. The big man was not speaking, but his was a presence that could not be missed now, and he moved with a burning intensity that made the air around him sizzle with tension.

He would, Michael thought, be a good ally in the days and months ahead, and a very dangerous enemy. He was glad to have him back.

Rachel, after the initial shock of seeing Jason animated again, was subdued and distant, but Michael looked into her grey eyes and saw the strength within them, and knew that she would heal. They all would.

They made their way to the small St. Davids medical centre and found Michael a wheelchair to use. It was cramped and basic, but it would do the job. It took him a while to adapt to this new way of moving, but he had done a lot of adapting lately, and this one little thing would not stop him. Not now.

They gathered some supplies – food, medicines, and whatever they could use as weapons: knives mostly: long, sharp blades retrieved from the butcher shop in the town square. Jason found an ancient-looking hunting rifle in the storeroom of the hunting and fishing shop, and a box of rounds. It would do.

Michael sat in his chair as Rachel and Jason loaded up the car, helping where he could, passing bags to them with his good arm. Thankfully, the other arm did not seem broken, but was just another source of pain. When he considered the dead weight of his legs, Michael was glad to have the pain.

When they were done, Rachel turned to him.

"You think he was lying, about there being an antidote?"

Michael mulled it over.

"He didn't say there wasn't. If there were no hope at all, I'm betting Victor would have told me that with relish. It's out there, somewhere."

Rachel nodded, and helped Jason lift Michael out of the chair, placing him gently on the back seat.

They took the road north, aiming for Aberystwyth.

When they reached the top of the hill that overlooked St. Davids Michael asked them to stop, and they helped him back into his chair.

He wheeled himself to the lip of the hill, and put on the brake.

Where St. Davids had been, there was now just a dark absence, a vacuum in the night. A civilisation that had survived fifteen hundred years had been extinguished in a day. Michael wondered whether the ancient streets, stained dark with blood, would ever again be a place for humans to live.

He became aware of Rachel, standing next to him in the dark, looking at the place that had once been her home.

"Will it all be like this?" She said softly. "Was Victor right? Is the whole world gone?"

"This was planned," Michael said without emotion. "Somewhere out there, the people who planned it are waiting for the worst to pass, then they will come back, and society will be rebuilt, and it will all be the same as before.

"There will be more out there like him," Michael said. "They are the dangerous ones now."

Rachel nodded, shivering in the cold night air, and returned to the car.

Michael set his collar against the wind with a grimace. On the horizon to the East and the North, the sky was lit by an orange glow.

Cities, burning.

Thanks for reading. Click here to join mailing list and be the first to know about new releases and special offers

# Also by K.R. Griffiths:

Wildfire Chronicles series:

Shock (Vol. 2)

Psychosis (Vol. 3)

Mutation (Vol. 4)

Trauma (Vol. 5)

Reaction (Vol. 6)

Coming soon:

Adrift

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www.krgriffiths.org

