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

relaxed him. Ash was the kind of guy who had to touch something to understand it. Made sense he’d be a pilot.
    John cursed himself for not seeing it sooner, even as it happened. Ash started poking at buttons on the console.
    “What does this-?”
    Ash’s curiosity was submerged in a deafening alarm that seemed to reverberate around the cramped bunker, rising to an ear-splitting crescendo, dying away for a few seconds before starting up again; a keening, mournful howl that made John’s teeth chatter.
    An air raid siren, you crazy bastard…
    The three men clamped their palms to their ears.
    “Shut it off!” Jeff screamed.
    Red-faced, Ash stabbed at the controls again, finally succeeding in hitting the right switch. The alarm died a long, slow death, rattlin g away into thunderous silence.
    Thump.
    John lifted his eyes to the ceiling even as his heart sank, but the answers he sought were right in front of his face, emblazoned across Ash’s distant eyes and slack mouth.
    Ash had been the last one down into the bunker.
    He hadn’t shut the hatch.
     

     
    Four
     
     
    Life had not been kind to Daley Williams.
    His mother had died in childbirth, and so Daley had been raised by his father, who would have been a hard man under ordinary circumstances, but who proved to be tougher than tempered steel on the boy that had killed his beloved wife.
    Daley grew up alone on the farm for the most part, Father generally finding that there was some urgent business that he needed to attend to, and which did not require Daley’ s input in the slightest.
    Never enrolled in a school, Daley instead grew up working the fields and tending the livestock, and tolerating the beatings that followed his inevitable adolescent mistakes. The day s became long and insufferable.
    And then Daley died, which proved to be the best day of his life.
    He’d been frozen in place holding a half-full bucket of feed when he saw the strange man tearing across the field toward the farm. A scream caught in Daley’s throat when the figure got close enough for him to see the blood, the ghoulish empty eye sockets. Shocked, he had barely flinched even when the creature had clamped its teeth into his forearm, chewing its way down through flesh to bone.
    Daley had stood in a daze as one of the farm’s dogs, an old Alsatian by the name of Bruce, leapt onto his attacker, knocking the sightless man to the ground. While the two of them writhed on the floor, all fur and blood and teeth, Daley simply wandered away.
    A pressure began to build behind his eyes, something that felt like needles were being sl owly slipped into the retinas. As the pain became unbearable, filling every fibre of his body, Daley finally understood what he had to do. Digging his nails into the soft whites and tearing the cancerous orbs out of their sockets felt like the most natural thing in the world. It felt like being born.
    As the synapses in Daley Williams’ mind began to reorganise themselves, old connections snapping only to be replaced, one last conscious thought passed through, insistent enough to linger like a lens flare: find Dad.
    When the creature that Daley Williams became was done on the farm, when every one of the presences that it perceived only as other had been dealt with, it began to wander. Ever increasing circles around the farm, into the forest beyond.
    The walk was directionless, utterly devoid of intention, just a progression of nature, like water slipping downhill.
    Until the noise.
    The noise was close, very close. Muffled, and yet loud enough to Daley’s ears that it might as well have been a jet engine bursting into life at his side. It was a hideous affront, filling him with pain.
    Daley charged at the noise, crashed into something hard that bounced him away, and landed him on the floor a few feet away. Got up. Charged again. Got up.
    At the third attempt, Daley Williams crashed through the obstacle with a sharp crack, and suddenly found himself in the a ir,