Shock (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 2) Read Online Free PDF

they had let slip through their fingers years before, and subsequently dismissed as an unimportant lunatic. By the time they realised that their plans were to be dependent on him, he was just another man that their world had already killed. John had felt the change in the atmosphere at the base; hadn’t needed anyone wearing a suit to brief him that things were going badly wrong.
    The initial wide smiles and self-congratulatory backslapping had dissolved in less than twenty four hours after the initial influx of people to the base. After that, it was scientists and suits scurrying from closed office to closed office carrying clipboards and frowns. They’d lost control.
    John had time to think about all this while Jeff processed Ash’s plea like a heavy meal. His eyes were glazed over. Increasingly, John realised, their ‘Captain’ was there…but not there. Jeff stared at the locked door, nodding absent-mindedly.
    The chopper was still John’s best chance. The base, whatever catastrophic fuck-up the thinkers had inflicted on the doers, still represented some form of safety.
    “Fuck it,” John snapped, and delivered a heavy kick to the locked door. The thud seemed to make the small room shake. A second kick, aimed squarely at the lock, and the door spat away from the frame with a crack.
    The room beyond was lit by small television screens, most showing only static, a couple delivering what looked like a CCTV feed from cameras installed high in the trees outside the bunker. Maybe ten screens in total, clustered around a console heaving with buttons and switches. John saw a button marked ‘turrets’ , another marked ‘fire’. The landmines they had stumbled across had merely been a part of it. Victor Chamberlain had extensively rigged the land around the bunker with defensive weaponry.
    John smirked. The weapons had been intended to repel a human attack. There would have b een no need to use them on the Infected. The better way to deal with them was to sit in the bunker and wait them out. Instead, when one of the sightless bastards had stepped on a landmine, the resulting explosion had served as a beacon, drawing more and more of them to this particular spot. The bloodbath in the forest, bodies upon bodies, made sense now, though the knowledge that Victor had undoubtedly gone up to do battle with the creatures himself did not. Nor, come to think of it, did it shed any light on how Chamberlain had died. Not as a result of an encounter with one of his creations, that much was obvious. They had a preference for teeth and blood and exposed organs. Victor’s death had been sedate by comparison. Sedate and… personal.
    Victor had let someone else into the bunker. Somebody that had wound up crushing the life out of him before leaving. It made no sense. John scanned the rest of the small room. There was a notebook on a low table, and he flipped through it. A quick scan revealed it to be some sort of journal, ordered at first, gradually descending into chaos as he flipped through the pages, ending in scrawls and obscene doodles. The isolation had apparently driven the man – unhinged enough to begin with – into full-blown insanity. John sighed. Ash was right; there was nothing for them here.
    Nothing…except… something about Victor’s setup here nagged at the corners of John’s mind. Some feeling that he was missing something important.
    He was busy ruminating on this, feeling around the puzzle in his mind, so he didn’t see it. Didn’t see Ash reaching for the console until it was too late .
    John had only known Ash for about a week, but he knew within five minutes of meeting him that Ash was the kind of guy who loved to play with things. On the base, John rarely saw the man’s hands empty, always fidgeting with something. When he greeted someone, Ash did so by clapping them on the shoulder, a habit that John was sure he’d be sick of almost immediately, but the cheerful grin that accompanied the contact soon