The Mersey Tunnel connected the town of Birkenhead to Liverpool, running deep beneath the Mersey Estuary. When Michael saw it looming in the distance, he had already been running for nearly two miles, and the pain in his back had consumed his entire being. Nothing seemed to penetrate the wall of agony: no emotion, even fear, found a way through.
Until he saw the yawning blackness of the tunnel entrance, and his pace began to falter.
Birkenhead was a ghost town, as the entire peninsula appeared to be. That wasn’t surprising: the virus would have ripped through the isolated stretch of land in no time, and the Infected would have been forced to move south to find more prey.
Or north.
Into the tunnel.
Into the impenetrable darkness.
A handful of the group had flashlights; a couple of them had mobile phones taken during the raid on Caernarfon: pocket-sized communications miracles that were now useful only for the soft light the screen provided. When the batteries ran out, the phones would become fossils. The days of recharging anything were finished.
The thundering of footsteps behind them had maintained its volume, and was still heading north. Michael imagined the entire peninsula heaving with the Infected, scrambling across each other to get to the fleeing group of humans, a seething mass of death that stretched from one coast to the other.
Not helpful, Mike.
He felt the group begin to slow behind him, and heard the clicking of flashlights being turned on. Felt the fear, too, radiating off the people in sickening waves.
In the tunnel they would be as blind as the Infected. The monsters would have a clear advantage.
They need your courage now, Mike. They need somebody to follow.
Michael gritted his teeth, pushing back the agony and the terror, and beckoned to the group to pick up the pace.
Thirty seconds later he plunged into the tunnel, and the world was reduced to darkness and writhing shadows.
*
The world was pools of light that danced across an endless dark, but Claire could feel the walls of the place even without seeing them. The air in the tunnel felt still, and heavier somehow than it had outside.
All the flashlights did was confirm that they were underground; none was powerful enough to truly light the way forward.
Claire had been underground in the darkness once before, trapped inside a car when the power died. Things had moved in the darkness then. Things that still terrified her and tormented her dreams.
She felt like screaming.
The tunnel was wide, and when lit it had probably appeared unremarkable; white-tiled and sterile. Just another road. In the darkness it became something else; filled with intent, like the blackness wanted to wrap invisible hands around her throat. Like the air itself was alive with something dangerous.
After every few steps, Claire hesitated, until finally Linda stumbled into the back of her, and it was all Claire could do to keep the scream from bursting out of her throat. She felt Linda’s hand on her shoulder. The woman gave a reassuring squeeze, and Claire began to move forward again.
Far beneath the estuary, the tunnel curved and snaked toward Liverpool, and Claire could no longer see the frail light of the stars behind her. In front there was only darkness.
Darkness and emptiness, until the silence gave way to a faint grunting sound on the road ahead, and Claire suddenly crashed into something.
*
Michael had held up a closed fist, but of course no one had seen it. Everyone that had a light had it pointed outwards like a searchlight, as though scanning for the iceberg that might sink them at any moment. He gritted his teeth as Claire ran into him, and heard the ripple effect as it moved through the group. The faint whispering of frightened bodies coming into contact. Nobody spoke. There wasn’t even so much as a grunt of surprise.
We might just get away with that, Michael thought, and he froze, straining to catch any noise in the dark space ahead. He was sure he had heard something. A soft grunt.
His flashlight had a range of about thirty yards, and Michael could only properly pick out detail for fifteen of those, but he thought he saw something further along the road. A shape moving in the darkness.
He crept forward, and saw it after five steps, and his mouth dropped open.
Another grunt.
The rhythmic movement was unmistakeable.
It can’t be…
He took another step.
About twenty yards ahead of him he saw two of the Infected, pressed together. Thrusting and bucking. Mating.
No, not mating, Michael realised in growing horror. Breeding.
Breeding.
The hideous truth of Project Wildfire rolled out endlessly before him, and he saw it all with a sudden, piercing clarity.
The Infected would not just die out. They wouldn’t starve. Survival for humans was not just a matter of finding a safe place and waiting for the apocalypse to pass. It had been there in front of his eyes all along. The creatures were evolving. A new species a matter of weeks old. They were genetically wired to kill humans, but there was nothing supernatural about them; they were just mammals. They would adapt, they would procreate. Some had learned to communicate; some guided those less advanced than themselves. Some could swim.
A species in its infancy, rising inexorably, learning and adapting to the environment that they had inherited.
He understood suddenly just why the creatures were compelled to kill those who had been their blood relations before they turned. The virus compelled them to kill off their old family so that they could replace it with a new one. The world belonged to them and they weren’t going anywhere. They were thriving.
Even the animals could contract the virus. Wildfire was everything now, and everywhere; a part of the planet itself, as ubiquitous as water and air and death.
The world hadn’t ended. Hadn’t been destroyed.
It’s just been transformed. And there’s no place left in it for us.
It took only a moment for Michael’s brain to run through it all, but it was long enough. Just enough time to distract him from the fact that there was a noise behind him now. A pounding of heavy feet.
Jason charged past Michael, hefting the pipe and killing the first of the Infected with a single blow, but he wasn’t quick enough. Even as he pulled the pipe clear and began to swing again, the second Infected creature registered the sudden noise in the tunnel.
And shrieked.
The noise ended a moment later with an abrupt liquid crunch, but it seemed to echo off the walls of the tunnel forever, taking on a life of its own.
Michael held his breath and began to count.
One.
Two.
Three.
He expected the darkness to be split by an answering shriek, but there was no sound. He exhaled a long, slow breath and drew in another, shuddering.
“Bet you’re glad we brought Jason along now, huh?”
Rachel breathed the words into Michael’s ear and he jumped. He hadn’t noticed her moving alongside him in the darkness. He trained his flashlight on Jason, and even as he opened his mouth to speak he saw the big man stiffen suddenly, as a faint shriek reached his ear.
Fourteen.
“That was fourteen seconds away. Behind us,” Michael growled as Rachel’s eyes widened. He turned to the group that he couldn’t see, but which he knew were clustered behind him the darkness, holding flashlights that all poured in the same direction for once, bathing Jason and the dead Infected in a wide pool of light.
“They’ll be coming,” he hissed into the darkness. “They're not far away. They’ll come fast. We have to run.”
He half-worried that there might be debate or at least terror to slow them down, but Jason provided a dreadful punctuation that underscored his argument.
With a grunt, Rachel’s giant brother began to strike the road at his feet with the lead pipe like a metronome.
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
It’s up to you now, Rachel, Michael thought, and with that he turned, grabbing Claire’s small hand, and began to run once more.
*
You can do this, Rach.
John’s final words blazed in Rachel’s mind clearly, as if bright sunlight poured across them and brushed away the shadows that had obscured their true meaning.
His message hadn’t been about Annie Holloway, or the Infected or Project Wildfire. It hadn’t even been about her survival, at least not directly. John had been talking about Jason. The one thing that he had known she would have to do if she was to have any chance of living.
Rachel remained frozen as the others began to sprint forward, leaving her alone with her giant brother. She studied his empty features, his eyes pointed at the unending darkness implacably, as though that was all they had ever seen.
You can leave him. You have to leave him.
Somewhere behind her the single shriek had become a wall of static; a meaningless cacophony that grew louder with each passing second. Soon the noise would enter the tunnel like a speeding train, and Jason would be there to meet it.
A huge sob wracked her body.
“I love you, Jase. I’m so sorry.”
It might have been her imagination, maybe just a mirage spotted in the desert of her mind. Just wish fulfilment, John would probably have called it, but as Rachel sprinted away from her brother, leaving him behind forever, she thought she had detected a flicker of something in his eyes. A vague flash of terror and loneliness that made her heart break.
*
By the time Jason began to swing, cutting into the tide of Infected that split around him like water crashing over a rock in the black tunnel, Rachel’s footsteps had long moved beyond his hearing. She was gone, and what remained of Jason Roberts wasn’t certain she had ever existed in the first place. Yet with each skull he crushed, there was a part of him, a fractured part buried deep somewhere that felt glad that she ran.