Читать книгу Deep RED - Paul Kane - Страница 10
ОглавлениеC h a p t e rO n e
She was still running.
As fast as she could, arms out in front to bat away the foliage. Escaping through the woodland, through the dense green that surrounded her: the safe path nothing but a distant memory. Breath coming in short bursts, hardly daring to look at what was behind her. Hardly daring to remember what had happened in case she might break down and cry. End up standing stock still when she should be running through—
The estate at night, through streets that were barely lit. Away from what had occurred back there in the small flat ... No, that wasn’t how she’d escaped. She’d ... There’d been a vehicle, a van of some kind. A young lad called Peter and she’d been—
Running, back to the motel room. Not away from the chaos this time but towards it, back to try and save the one man she’d loved more than anything in this world. Tom. Hunter. The man she’d just spent the most magical night of her life with except he was—
Back at the cabin, where her Gramma had met her end. Blood everywhere; red everywhere. He’d bought her the time to escape, to flee. Used that axe of his to distract the creature who’d been pretending to be her kin. Sacrificed himself so that she could get away, only the thing had chased her anyway once it was done with him. Chased her through the woods, through the generations, until it found her again. Until she’d come back full circle to the cabin, the flat, the motel room. So long ago, and yet no time at all. Different lives, different times.
It was almost time ...
All so confusing, so confused. A jumble in her mind. The only thing she was certain of was that she had to run, to get away before—
No, wait, she’d won! She’d defeated the creature ... hadn’t she? That’s what she thought. Yes, she’d defeated him—taken the monster on and beaten the thing. Only for the whole world to go to Hell after that, their progeny taking over.
She hadn’t stopped anything, hadn’t really won at all. The only good thing to come out of all this was—
Run! Run Little Red, as fast as you can!
And she was, again, through the green with something chasing her. How could it be chasing her when it was dead? When she’d killed it?
Already dead, just too stubborn to admit it. Too afraid.
Should she risk a glance, just a peek? She shook her head, she didn’t want to see because then she’d know for sure. Then she’d have to admit it to herself. That she was losing control, losing her grip. Losing her ... mind? It was a wonder that hadn’t gone a long time ago. Sometimes, moving from place to place—running again—she had to wonder whether she’d already gone stark, staring mad. Wonder whether this wasn’t all some dream, some nightmare she was unable to wake up from. On the run from the authorities, from people she owed money to, from ... everyone.
Running, always running. Perhaps that was it, she’d been doing that for so long she didn’t know how to stop.
You have to make sure, she said to herself. Take a look and make sure there’s nothing behind you, nothing following. Make sure you’re safe.
So she did. She turned, then let out a breath this time—not because she was exhausted, but through sheer relief. There was nothing out in the darkness, in that dark green through the branches. Nothing following, nothing hunting her.
Then she saw it: Red.
A red spot, a crimson circle. Only small, but it was there. A single red ... No, not single. There were two of them now, quite close together. A pair of eyes; glowing red eyes. She almost screamed. It was still behind her, was still following after all these years. Wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be possible! She’d—
Two more of them appeared, not far away from the first set. As if they’d only just sensed her, only just spotted that she was ahead of them. Moments later another pair of eyes opened, then another, and another.
She wanted to scream now, long and loud. Wanted to scream at them to stay away, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t find her voice. Ten, twenty, thirty ... she was losing count now. So many eyes out there in the woods, just staring at her. There were more eyes than trees now, surely? Just watching her intently, waiting for ... for what? For her to make some kind of move; to even twitch. And then they’d be on her.
They’d strike.
Was she going to give them that satisfaction? Let them just have her? Shouldn’t have stopped running, should just have kept going. But it wasn’t too late, was it? She could turn and start again, try and escape. And that’s just what she did, whirling around as fast as she could, facing front again ...
Except the eyes were there as well. Ahead of her as well as behind. The future and the past. There was no escaping them, there never had been. That had been the real dream, thinking she ever could.
Quickly she looked left and right. Of course they were there as well, the red orbs securitising her, boring into her.
She had seconds, if that. Had to think of a way out of this. Not just stand there trying to cry out, letting them devour her. Like the last time. Like one of their kind had, although that bastard had regretted it in the end. Okay, let them come—she’d fight them. As weak as she was, she’d—
That was when they struck. All of them, all at once. Descending on her, tearing into her with claws and teeth. Ripping her limb from limb, the pain incredible.
She screamed then. The longest and loudest scream she’d ever managed in her life.
Screamed until ...
... suddenly she opened her own eyes, right here, in the real world. If you could call it that. Screaming at the faces that surrounded her, that always did, day after day after day.
Faces that, more often that not, also had glowing eyes. Glowing eyes that were a deep shade of red.
He was surrounded, those red eyes out there in the darkness.
Not just him, but the others who had managed to escape as well. Trooper Andrew ‘Angel’ Southland (named by his mother, who always called him her little Angel) looked about him at what actually remained of those survivors. He could count them on the fingers of two hands ... barely. All that was left of an outpost which had boasted more than fifty people, most of them fighters like himself; thank Christ there hadn’t been any children at that station! Nobody had been expecting the sneak attack, there had been no warning—their lookouts killed before anything could be done to raise an alarm.
They’d come through the back way, through an underground system they shouldn’t even know about. Clawing left and right, biting and ripping apart anyone who stood in their way until the walls were painted with blood. Forcing the humans there to the surface, into the twilight, where more of their kind were waiting. Angel had been proud of the way his men had fought, in those close quarters beneath the ground, then on the surface; facing an overwhelming number of mutts.
A massacre, that’s what this was. An attempt—a successful one—to totally obliterate 5C. To wipe it off the face of the Earth. He and those who’d crawled away from there, others giving them covering fire—sacrificing themselves so that they could escape—had run. Though he wasn’t leader material or anything, Angel had taken charge of the rag-tag team that was in total disarray; no sergeants, captains or majors left to dish out orders. And they’d tried to get away, only to be chased down the war-torn streets. Their enemy had finally cornered them near a park, where there was really only one place to attempt a last stand: a burnt-out bus. With a nearby bit of metal, Angel had levered open the emergency door at the back (if ever anything counted as an emergency, it was this) and ushered the others inside, waving his arm furiously until there was only him left. Then he’d joined them as they’d taken up positions at the windows—or what had once been windows at any rate. Relieved of their glass, they at least made decent gun placements.
It was from one of those that Angel now witnessed the approach of the dogs. He rushed to the other side of the bus, saw they were there too. A quick glance through the back and front ‘windows’ also confirmed that they were circling the old vehicle. There was no way out, he and the survivors were surrounded—just like in those old westerns he used to watch with his brother. An older brother who’d been killed in one of the first waves of attacks when those freaks rose up. The passing thought made him mad, chased away the fear mom-entarily.
“Pick your targets,” he called to the other troopers in the bus, knowing they only had a limited amount of ammo left. “Make every shot count. And let’s make these sons of bitches—”
That was where the speech ended, cut off when the wolves—as one—made their move. When they sprang towards the bus and his people began shooting. Some of the silver bullets hit their marks, Angel’s included as he hunkered down and joined them in firing at the sea of fur. But it hardly dented their numbers, more hounds taking the place of their fallen comrades pretty much immediately.
There was a scream, and Angel looked across in time to see one of the troopers get dragged through a window. The top half of his body vanished, leaving khaki legs kicking out, so hard one of the man’s boots came off and was flung back into the bus to bounce off a seat. Then the legs just stopped moving, collapsing against the window as a jet of redness sprayed inside.
Angel put up a hand, stepping back to avoid the blast of warm liquid—only to nearly slip on the floor which was already slick with it.
More screams, as troopers at other windows were killed one by one. Angel couldn’t tear his eyes away as a clawed fist punched its way through one soldier’s head, deflating it like a balloon; the meat and bone hardly slowing it down.
One trooper had his rifle wrenched from him and broken in two, such was the strength of these creatures. Then the muzzle end was rammed into its owner’s chest, like he was a vampire being staked.
Bit by bit, the anger had drained from Angel to be replaced by fear again. The self-preservation thing that had urged these people to follow him, away from the main battle. But there was no way out, not now. Maybe not ever. There were just three of them left now, the others—only one of which he recognised, as a trooper called Harrison—had joined him, were even looking to him to get them out of this. Impossible! They were doomed ... Not just the trio of survivors, but the human race. How could they ever have hoped to succeed against those things to begin with, when not even the governments, the real armies hadn’t stood a chance? The most they’d been able to do was survive ... for a little while anyway. Hope to see another dawn once night fell.
Now Angel knew that he definitely wouldn’t—that he’d be joining the other angels very soon—a kind of peace washed over him. He wouldn’t have to struggle anymore, rail against all this. Wouldn’t have to live in fear, waiting for the other foot to fall every day. For him, it would be over. No more fighting, no more battles ...
As the wolves flooded into the bus, he abandoned all hope and just waited for the inevitable.
But he was wrong to do so.
At the very last minute, perhaps even the last second, he heard it. The sound of engines. All the mutts that were inside the bus, that had been approaching Angel and his colleagues, eying them up as their next meal, paused, sniffed the air, then turned at the same time.
The wolves that had been climbing all over the outside of the bus were suddenly being scraped off, like he’d seen his dad scrape ice from the car during those harsh winters back in the day. No, not scraped so much as blown off—or more accurately torn into by a gun more powerful than anything they possessed to combat the enemy. The noise was incredible!
The ones inside exited, in support of, or in solidarity with, their kind; Angel didn’t quite know, didn’t care. But they ended up suffering the same fate. He rushed to a window and saw one of them get ripped to pieces by bullets that looked like miniature flaming arrows. Then Angel traced the fire back to a vehicle that had pulled up just off to the right of the bus, an open-backed pickup with a mounted machine gun at the rear that had ceased pumping out its deadly load for a moment.
“Deepak!” he heard someone shout, then traced that back to a man wearing a cap, riding a motorcycle which pulled up alongside the truck. “Concentrate your fire over there, into that clump of them! Ridgeway, go and check the bus for any survivors.”
Angel saw one of the men from the pickup, keeping his head low all the time and clutching his helmet, rush across to the bus, forcing his way inside through the front doors this time. He clocked the three of them left, nodded, then said: “I think this might be your stop, fellas. Everybody out!”
Angel let the others go first, then followed the man called Ridgeway himself as they half-crouched, half-shuffled towards the truck. There were still plenty of the mutts around, enough to overpower them all—enough to overrun Deepak and his gun. They weren’t out of the woods yet, by any stretch of the imagination. But Angel had started to hope again.
“Get in, get in,” Ridgeway told them, doing the same thing Angel had done when they’d found the bus—waving the survivors into the back of the pickup this time. He stopped for a second, raised his rifle and let off several bursts, felling a number of the creatures that had gotten too close for comfort.
The cap-guy on the bike was shouting orders at his team, telling them to get moving—that he would hold the enemy off, lead them away. Angel’s first thought was: Is he crazy? Then he took in the man, properly took him in now he was closer. There was a calmness about him that had nothing whatsoever to do with letting go of life, of giving up. Quite the opposite in fact: it came from embracing it, and all the confidence that went with that.
Here was a bloke who hadn’t just had the mantle of leadership thrust on him; he looked like he was born to it. And he was about to pull all of their arses out of the fire, as young as he appeared to be ... Twenty? Twenty-one, if he were a day.
“Go!” he shouted to Ridgeway, to his driver, and even slapped the side of the truck to emphasise they should get motoring. As they pulled away, Angel watched—the hounds now massing behind the biker. Watched as the man dragged the front of his bike up into the air, spinning on the back and taking out the nearest couple of wolves with his front wheel.
When it hit the floor again, he set off, trailed by a horde of the beasts. Not one of them came after their vehicle. The guy was leading them away like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, off into that park.
Angel realised his mouth was hanging open and he closed it again. He wasn’t quite sure what had just happened; how he was still alive. “He ...” All he could do was point back towards the biker. Finally, he found the words, staring at Ridgeway. “It’s suicide. They’ll slaughter him!”
The soldier shook his head. “I seen him get out of tighter spots than that, man. He’ll be okay.” Then Ridgeway smiled. “It’s down to him we came looking for you in the first place. We should have been scouting out a route for a supply run ... But he had a feeling something was wrong at 5C.”
Angel was gaping again, blinked once, twice. “How did...?”
“Look, don’t ask me. But I’ve been around long enough to know you trust that guy’s instincts, right?” There was a look in Ridgeway’s eye that told him this man had been saved by those instincts, probably more than once. Angel was still new to the experience though.
“But who...?” asked one of the other soldiers this time, for variety; Harrison he noted.
Ridgeway beamed once more, as the truck hit a bump in the road and jolted them all; as they passed what was left of a street sign that read ‘nham Estate’. He adjusted his helmet and regarded them all in turn, though Angel knew who that had to be back there. Even at 5C they’d heard the rumours, the stories. He hesitated to use the word legend, but if the cap fitted ... It could only be one person at the end of the day. But Jesus, he was so, so young.
“That folks ... that was—”
“Daniels,” Angel finished for him. “It was Tommy Daniels, wasn’t it.”
Ridgeway nodded, grinning again and clapping Angel’s shoulder. “The one and only, my friend. The one and only.”