Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) Read Online Free PDF

delivered the information, hoping that it would take a moment for them to process it.
    “Don’t react. Don’t look. Keep your voices low.”
    Jason merely stared at the charred remains of the fire. It would take more than being watched to shake him from the stupor that clouded his mind, Michael guessed. Rachel’s eyes narrowed.
    “How many?” She whispered.
    “ One, that I can see. Crouched behind you, about thirty yards. Just watching.” He saw Rachel eyeing the small pile of weapons they’d left by the fire, just out of reach. Lesson learned , Michael thought. Sleep with a weapon on you.
    “Don’t.” He said quietly, his tone steely. “If whoever that is has a gun, all you’ll do is spook them.”
    Rachel gave Michael a dubious look. Wales was home to very few guns. The look on her face gave him the impression that she thought the only person for a hundred miles with a gun was him.
    “He’d have to be a good shot to take out all of us before someone got to him.” It was Jason who spoke, startling Michael.
    “Wouldn’t need to, Jason. He could miss us all. But you know what’s out there. If he fires a gun, we’ll have more to worry about than bullets.”
    Jason pondered that for a moment, and nodded.
    “So what, then?” Rachel hissed.
    Michael thought a moment.
    “I’d say our best option is to say ‘hello’.”
     
    *
     
    Bailey had worked as a receptionist at Moorcroft for almost eight months, and had quickly discovered that the term reception was somewhat misleading: very few people ever visited the place. Most of the two hundred-or-so inhabitants had families; hardly any of them ever kept in touch with what was undoubtedly the black sheep of their family. Even government officials and safety inspectors tended to give the place a wide berth. Moorcroft received almost nobody.
    So, the fifteen-mile commute from Rothbury, the small town in which recession dictated she must live with her parents despite pushing thirty, was a pain in the rear, but the money was decent for the area. The job itself mainly consisted of flirting with the younger members of the staff and checking Facebook. She kept her reception in pristine order; and so on the morning the computers went down, Bailey found herself with nothing to do.
    She had refreshed her page a hundred times, even tried to call Joe, the laughably under-qualified I.T. Support, but found the external phone lines were down. In the absence of all other options, she fished out her mobile phone. The screen was small and fiddly, but at least 3G would get her back in touch with the world.
    Nothing.
    Of course, if she had been able to access the internet, Bailey might have been lost in the virtual world, and she might not have seen the man sprinting toward the front door of the Moorcroft Hospital. As it was, with no distractions, she noticed him almost immediately, and she had as much as thirty seconds to react as he made directly for her.
    Unfortunately, she also had time to see his face, to see the flesh ripped away from it, the bleeding holes where his eyes should have been, and the sight glued her to the spot, frozen like a mime, only her lower lip trembling, as though it possessed some advanced understanding of the situation that her brain did not.
    She was still rooted in place when the man, who some deep level of her brain recognised was growling, snarling like an animal, crashed through the main door and hurled himself across her reception desk and smashed into her, cracking her spine painfully across the small table that held the fax machine behind her, and sinking his teeth into her neck, sending a spray of blood – my blood! – arcing into the air above.
    Her last thought, the last action of Bailey’s brain before it became something else, was that the smear he had left across her tidy desk would need cleaning.
    And then she was up, and nothing in the world mattered more to her than ripping out her eyes. Removing them felt like bursting painful