Chapter 16 - A Hidden Light

The kitchen shutter rattles in place, an unconscious moan of pain uttering quietly from whoever wails upon it. Irene leaves the damaged lantern in place on the floor, working by its light to scavenge through the drawers. It seems as if she hasn’t found what she needed, huffing in frustration as she swings another cupboard open. She recoils as a stench rolls out from the opening, pushing it shut with her foot as she covers her nose with her hand.

The contents of her bag are strewn out a short distance from the lantern, the first aid kit and short pry-bar still half-tucked within. The rest she shifts aside, discarding it, clasping the bag back closed and tightening the strap over her shoulder. She raises her only prize from her hunt, a heavy cast-iron pan with a patina of rust gathering in its crevices.

“This feels like a joke.” She places it back on the kitchen counter, scoffing. “I can’t go around caving people’s heads in.”

Tink.

Tink.

From somewhere unseen, beyond the kitchen shutters, a tapping stands out amongst the groaning and scratching.

“For the love of- What do you want? I’m not going to look!” She shouts at the wall.

Her fingers are fidgeting anxiously as she does another pass of the room, the only ways in and out the shutter and the door, both shut.

Tink.

Tink.

Tink.

It persists, increasing in tempo and pressure. The shutter splinters as a heavy impact causes it to push inward, scraping against the frame. This causes Irene to freeze, her right thumb gently stroking the long scars of her left forearm as the hairs stand on end.

A blinding flash and a crash of deafening thunder shatters the room.

Irene is thrown forward, her head nearly hitting the tiled floor as she skids a short distance, debris showering her from behind.

Face-down, fragments of wood caught in her hair, she starts pushing herself up, glancing back as the ringing in the air subsides. The kitchen behind her is in pieces, the ceiling smoking and collapsed inward with floorboards from the room above poking through. A trickle of rain coming in from somewhere above, Irene stares at the scene before her, her breath ragged.

“I can’t be trapped again. I can’t be. For god’s sake, where are you, William?” Her voice hitches as she says his name, her eyes frantically scanning the shutters and the door. Back and forth, her option is clear but panic and trauma are eating away at her decision making.

Tink.

The shutters strain under another blow, one of them cracking along the centre as a hand breaks through, fingers an unnatural reddish-purple as they bend backward. She bolts, the door swinging outward into a hall, an open archway to the left and the sound of creaking joints calling out from it. The lantern provides a backlight for her, left behind as she runs down the hall toward the rain that whips through the streets. The front door is shattered inward, scraps of broken wood getting kicked out of the way as she runs. The silhouette of a tumbling mass of people breaks in behind her, obscuring the light of the lantern from reaching her as she ducks out the front door and off to the right.

Tink.

A tap, just to the right of her head as she passes the next house, causes her to veer off in a panic. Not noticing the person tucked into the shadows of her original path, she stumbles into the centre of the street, turning around twice to take in her surroundings before continuing on the way she had been running. Confident in her direction, she turns off at a junction. Her left boot slides on a damp cobble, her ankle straining and causing her to hop for a moment, her face screwed up in pain. She checks over her shoulder, spotting the ones she left behind idling blindly, they seem to have lost her in the rain.

For a fraction of a second the hair on her head begins to raise, before the road ahead of her flashes brightly, her arm swinging up to cover her eyes. A thunderclap vibrates through the air as a gentle trail of steam raises from temporarily dry cobbles only a street away. Her arm lowers, eyes blinking back into focus as she tries to readjust to the darkness. The thunder slowly fades, Irene swaying a little in shock, but the sound is rapidly replaced by approaching sodden impacts. 

She spins on her heel, looking behind to see countless silhouettes cracking backward and running in her direction. She takes a step away from them, stumbling slightly as her ankle can’t take the weight, she turns back to try and run again. She makes it two steps before she pulls herself back, noticing several others turning the corners of the houses into the junction.

“Damn it!” She hisses through gritted teeth.

There is some distance between her and the closest, but it’s closing fast as she pivots back and forth looking at her dwindling options.

“This way!” A masculine voice calls from the rain, somewhere in the houses ahead.

“What? Where are you?”

“Quickly!”

Dispensing with paranoia, she hobbles a step before finding her stride, considerably slower than her previous run. The group from behind have formed almost an approaching wall, shoulder to shoulder with their arms outstretched toward her, a discordant chorus of pained groans echoing out from them. Irene ducks beneath the clawing hands of a sickly thin woman in a frayed dress, desperately searching for the source of the voice between the significantly less dense group of figures in front. There. A waving hand from the darkened doorway of a two-storey home. She bites down hard as she pushes her damaged ankle to allow her to move just a little faster, just enough to get her between them, to the house. Swollen and broken fingers scrape against her shoulders, skeletal-thin ones catch her hair.

She barrels through the open door, tumbling with a cry of pain as she skids on the carpeted floor. The door slams shut, a grunt of effort as something unseen is shifted against it just a moment before they hit it.

“Get up the stairs, they’ll ’ear us!”

-

Droplets form at the ends of her hair, dripping freely as she wipes some rainwater from her eyes. Ada blinks a few times as she assesses the quarantine border. She places her hands on her knees and takes a deep breath, looking back up at the shifting beacon that moves throughout the puddles of the street, glittering and highlighting the occasional twisted body of someone lost.

“Why wouldn’t they mention the light?” She rolls her right shoulder in its socket, her face highlighting the soreness building in it.

She starts walking, watching its movement from a safe distance. These people seem to shift and react on their own, but when bathed in this unknown light they follow it like they can see it clearly. She presses herself against a wall as it sweeps nearby, her eyes squeezing closed, hands balled into fists. It makes no noise, but Ada shivers fully as it moves away, despite being unable to see it.

Her eyes open slowly, revealing it is no longer anywhere to be seen. Her hand flies to her stomach as she retches against the wall, shivering violently. It is less than a minute before she regains herself, pressing on slowly but surely.

-

“Do you think you could tell me who you are?” Irene whispers pointedly, her tone promising violence.

“Jason, Ma’am. I work for the Mayweather Estate.” A bright-eyed younger man in his early twenties responds in a faint accent. He is tall, thin with floppy auburn hair with a few days of stubble growing in.

Irene eyes him up and down. His clothes are in disarray, what must have been a fine suit is missing a jacket and any finery, leaving him in a ripped white shirt and black trousers. He does, however, have a matching iron pendant to that which Irene and Andrew wear.

“Well, Jason, thank you. How long have you been here?”

“A coupla’ days. I only started at the Estate a little over a week ago, I think. I was asked to help work on investigating the infection spreading in these streets on account of my medical studies.” He takes a deep breath in. “It was quiet when I arrived, streets were empty. I wandered into this house because I could’ve swore I saw someone in here, but when I found them I ended up locking myself in upstairs. I’ve been stuck here since, hiding from these…”

“Just call them people. You can call me, Irene.” She takes stock of the room, there’s signs of him living here, a previously emptied bedroom now laid out with several blankets and a pile of half-eaten food shoved into a corner. “Jason, I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone else that’s not like them roaming about?”

“Sorry, no. I haven’t been looking out at all where I can avoid it, but that lightning struck so close I had to see what was going on. That’s when I saw you.”

“And thank god you did. How much do you know about the infection?”

“Anything I thought I knew was most definitely proven wrong when I ran into them people for the first time. No disease or infection I’ve ever heard of can cause people to behave that way.”

“Precisely right. It’s something else altogether. Not sure what, but we know it’s got something to do with reflections. So for your own sake, don’t look at any mirrors.”

“I’ll take that in consideration, thank you.” He rests against the wall, looking at his own feet. “What are you doing here?”

“In a way, I work for the Estate too.” She holds up the thin necklace round her neck. “I don’t know how much you were told, but you should know they only give these to people they work with.”

He nods.

“I am here with a friend, trying to find your predecessor, of sorts. We believe that if we go to the centre of this ‘outbreak’, we can either find him or find traces of him.” She exhales with a sigh, massaging her ankle idly. “With any luck, we’ll find what we need to stop this whole mess too.”

“I’ll help, if I can. I need to get out of here anyway.”

“You’ve done plenty, it would be fair for you to stay here or try and run out.”

“Can’t do that. My da would smack me upside the head if he knew I’d left a woman alone in this kind of crisis.”

“That’s very sweet. He raised you well.”

“Well enough to know you probably don’t need my help all that much, but if I can offer you anything I should.

“Wise too, well done.” She smiles warmly. “I’m trying to make it to the Thackery residence. If I’m right, it’s at the end of this street. Hopefully my friend will have made it there already.”

“The end of the street?” He gestures behind him. “That end of the street? You’re ‘avin me on.”

Irene just stares blankly.

“Oh, well it’s just… before the storm, when they all came out, I was looking down that way. I felt this feeling, like that feeling you get when suddenly your feet don’t feel safe on the floor no more. Or you are in deep water, and you see something move, all of a sudden you just want more than anything to be out of the water. Your whole body is aching to get away, to escape from it.”

“Sounds like fear, well founde-”

“It’s not fear, Irene. Not this. It’s something so much worse, it’s instinctive. It felt like I was being chased, but there were nothing there.” He is tense, his whole body shaking recalling it.

“I don’t have another option. I have to go there. If you don’t want to come, don’t. I don’t want you risking your life for chivalry.”

He simply shakes his head in response, standing from the wall and clenching his jaw. He gestures toward the door. “They should’ve left by now, let’s get a move on.”

-