Coldbrook (Hammer) (22 page)

Marc stood and stretched, then pulled open a drawer in his desk and produced a bottle of Knob Creek and two glasses. Vic couldn’t help smiling. So very much like Jonah.

‘
This
is being prepared?’ Vic asked. He couldn’t hold the implied criticism from his voice – he might be guilty, but he had never been meek.

Marc actually looked hurt. ‘Did it using my own funds. It isn’t the fucking President’s White House bunker, but yeah, it’s being prepared. There’s water and food to last several weeks, a lab and a communications room in the basement – which can be isolated, if needs must. Very secure from the outside. Air conditioning, hermetically sealed doors . . . lots of other stuff.’ He waved one hand. ‘Don’t want to bore you.’ He handed Vic a glass, sat beside him on the sofa, and poured.

Vic took a grateful drink and winced as the bourbon burned its way down.

‘So what is it you do, exactly?’

‘Lots,’ Marc said. ‘But what’s pertinent to our current fucked-up situation is my research into disease vectors.’

‘You think this is a bug?’

‘Don’t you?’

Vic shrugged.

‘Just because people are using the word zombie,’ Marc said, ‘don’t go getting all spooked on me. I’ve spoken with Jonah, and he’s seen them first-hand. Killed a few of them himself. The body shuts down. The infection takes over their brain. And once we work out what the infection is, we might have a chance at a cure. Or an inoculation, at least.’

‘Body shuts down. Dead.’

‘Well . . .’ Marc said, and Vic saw the first glimmer of doubt.

‘So you produce an inoculation – what about those who are already infected?’

Marc raised his eyebrows. ‘Not our priority, sad to say.’

Vic rested his head back against the sofa, changing the subject. ‘So who does the chopper on the roof belong to?’

‘A friend of mine.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘No, really,’ Marc said. ‘I
do
have friends.’

‘I should tell Jonah I’m here,’ Vic said. ‘Update him. See what he’s doing down there. He said he was alone, the only survivor.’
And I worry for him
, Vic wanted to
say. But after everything he’d done, that sounded so trite.

‘Jonah’s a hard motherfucker,’ Marc said. ‘His father worked in a coal mine, he ever tell you that? Fifty-two years. And every day of Jonah’s childhood, his father said he was working down there so Jonah didn’t have to do the same thing. His sense of worth comes from that, and his honour, and a lot of his attitude. Then when poor Wendy died . . .’ Marc shook his head and poured more bourbon. ‘Something on your mind?’ he asked.

Vic frowned and looked around the room, trying to grab hold of the thought that had been circling his consciousness for the last half an hour. Marc’s perception was sharp and, though they hadn’t exactly hit it off, it felt good to be around someone he couldn’t hide anything from. It meant that Marc was in control.

‘Something’s bugging me,’ Vic said, closing his eyes and rubbing them.

‘Your trip up here? Radio reports? Something you saw on the way?’

‘Jesus!’ Vic said. He closed his eyes and had it. So
obvious
! ‘They were completely still.’

‘Huh?’

Vic jumped up and pointed to the computer. ‘Those images, that military site. Bring them up again.’

‘You saw something I didn’t?’ Marc said. But he tapped
at the computer and brought up the site, and Vic reached past him and clicked on a film clip taken from a low-flying helicopter. They both watched for a couple of minutes, neither of them commenting, and Vic was starting to think he’d been imagining things. Then he saw it.

He leaned across Marc and hit pause.

‘Here,’ he said, pointing at one of the zombies in the crowd of afflicted people. ‘A woman. She’s lost an arm and has abdominal wounds. Run over, maybe. But while all the others are running and doing whatever they can to reach . . .’ He pointed below the screen, where a crashed camper van was out of shot. ‘
She
’s doing something different.’

He hit play again. The woman stood motionless. The only movement was her head, turning left and right as a dozen other zombies raged past her, running as fast as their injuries would allow towards the camper. Some of them fell as the occupants of the crashed vehicle fired, then she too crumpled.

‘Didn’t see a bullet hit her,’ Marc said.

‘That’s because she wasn’t shot. She was watching, that’s all. Observing.’

‘Why?’ Marc asked.

‘Don’t know. Pacifist zombie?’

‘Call Jonah,’ Marc said. ‘Tell him. I’ll patch in on my phone.’

As Vic dialled he thought,
This has only just begun
.

Jonah shut and locked the door, though he knew it would do no good. He had been visited before – the dream on the day they made breach, and afterwards. Doors were no barrier.

Bill Coldbrook had killed himself without explanation. Jonah remembered finding the old man hours after it had happened, walking into his room and seeing the stillness that seemed so unreal, and the expression of peace on his face and . . . escape? Perhaps that’s what it had been. There had been no note, but the old man’s dying expression had said it all.

Not just me
, Jonah thought, and the idea was terrible.
That bastard has been here before
.

He wrote down each vision he had been shown. Some might have been of this Earth, though he thought not. He tried not to consider for now the reason
why
he had been shown because that was not something he could discern from a set of notes. But he did not trust his old man’s memory. And the visions – they looked more real when written down. More firm.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he muttered, welcoming the sound of his own voice. The silence had become too loaded. He sat in his chair in Secondary, staring at the screen showing the breach and its containment field, and
a flicker of blue arced across the screen as the eliminator fried a small creature. Elsewhere, the rest of Coldbrook was still and silent, except for the rooms where he had trapped the afflicted. He flicked past these places slowly, fascinated and horrified.

The assault had left him feeling violated. The man’s touch had been uninvited, but more disturbing than the physical intrusion had been the emotional one – those images placed in his mind, not only showing him scenes of horror, but leaving them in his memory. He shivered, and vowed that next time he would fight harder.

The satphone rang, startling him from his thoughts. He snatched it up and took a few deep breaths.

‘Vic,’ he said.

‘Jonah. We’ve reached Marc, safe and sound. You okay?’

‘Fine,’ Jonah said.

‘All quiet there?’

‘All quiet.’

‘The breach?’ Even over the grumbling connection he could discern Vic’s true meaning.

‘Nothing,’ Jonah said. Vic was silent for a while, but Jonah could hear his breathing. ‘Vic, there’s no reason to believe that anything bad happened to Holly.’

‘Other than she’s stepped across into an alternate Earth that might be swarming with zombies.’

‘The one that came through was . . . a weak thing,’
Jonah said. ‘It walked slowly, not like the ones that have changed here. It looked like an animal.’ He thought that through, concentrating on something he’d had no time to dwell on until now.

‘But it still caused all this.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she’s there,’ Vic said. ‘Our ambassador.’

‘She’ll make a good one.’

‘Marc is quite a character,’ Vic said.

‘Has he beaten your stupid head in yet?’

‘I haven’t yet,’ Marc said, and Jonah smiled. He hadn’t realised the three phones were patched in.

‘Marc. Good to hear you. Vic might be useful for a while longer yet.’

‘Well, maybe he is. Let him tell you.’

‘Jonah,’ Vic said, ‘I’ve seen something on the footage. Has Marc sent you the passwords to this site?’

‘Yes,’ Jonah said. ‘But I haven’t had time to look.’

‘One of them doesn’t act like all the others. She just stands there, watching. An observer.’

Jonah held his breath and closed his eyes.

‘Jonah, you there?’

‘This observer – what does it look like?’

‘She’s lost an arm,’ Vic said.

‘And her stomach’s all fucked up,’ Marc added.

‘Her face?’

‘Well, she looks quite normal there. Expressionless,
but then they’re all . . .’ Vic trailed off, because he did not need to finish.

‘Interesting,’ Jonah said. ‘Let’s see if we can find any more. Meanwhile, Marc, have you any thoughts?’

‘Sure. Get me to Coldbrook, let me through the breach, and I’ll get a sample of the disease from over there, compare it with however it’s spread and mutated in us, and maybe I can come up with something. Piece of cake. In the meantime, things are moving on apace. They’ve started bombing Atlanta, and it’s spreading fast.’

‘What have you been doing down there?’ Vic asked.

‘Just doing my best to survive,’ Jonah said. They arranged another call time in two hours, then signed off. Jonah put the phone down and breathed into the silence, and the wall screens flickered off.

He held his breath.

The lights went out as the power failed, and the laptop switched to battery mode, flashing a red-highlighted message:

Net connection terminated
.

The aircraft was mostly silent, even though it was full, and many people were concentrating on their mobile and laptop screens. Jayne had taken a walk to the bathroom an hour into the flight, and the sight of so
many people with their heads tilted down had been unsettling. The night flight passenger compartment was darkened, and the glow from screens and phones had formed islands of light across the cabin. People had been whispering, and one woman was crying.
Bet none of them have seen what I’ve seen
, Jayne had thought, and in the toilet she too had cried.

An old episode of
Friends
was playing on her seat-back screen, but Jayne saw none of it.
The One Where They’re All Eaten By Zombies
, she’d thought as the programme had begun, but she hadn’t found it in herself to smile.

The churu had started to settle in her joints and bones, and for the past hour she had been steadily massaging her hips and shoulders. The man beside her hadn’t seemed to notice, or if he had he’d not seen any reason to comment. Stranger things were happening. Worse things. She shifted in her seat and groaned as her hips flexed. The man glanced up, then down again at his netbook.

‘It’s the bites,’ he said. They were his first words since the start of the journey.

‘Bites,’ she repeated. The pain in her arm was a sharp slice down to her bone. It was a different pain from the churu – a wound rather than a blazing ache – and she concentrated on it because it was easier to control.

‘Fucked up,’ the man muttered, and he started tapping at his computer again.

Jayne looked out of the window; she didn’t want to see the computer screen. There was nothing to see outside but she couldn’t sleep with this pain, so staring into the darkness was the next best thing. She kept massaging herself – left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder – and she twisted and flexed her ankles and knees, trying to work blood through her joints. But however much she worked at herself, she knew she’d need help to walk by the time they reached London.

A slow, misty warmth began behind her eyes, and she closed them, trying to will the fainting away. It was never the pain that drove her down into these comas – the worst agonies conspired to keep her awake – but something else to do with the churu.
It’s getting inside my head
, she’d said to Tommy, but she had tried denying to herself that the blackouts were getting more frequent, and deeper every time.

It was bad enough having a body she couldn’t rely on. The idea of losing her mind . . . she could never live with that. Tommy had known that, too. And they’d never discussed it, because they were both afraid of what she would ask of him.

‘Shit,’ she slurred, and the mist thickened into a fog.

You okay?
she heard from some distance. She tried to nod but that swilled her brain around in her head, her eyes bulged with the pressure, and she squeezed her fingers into her thighs, hoping the pain might bring
her around. But she was a slave to pain, not its master, and the voice mumbled something from afar as the darkness pulled her down.

Tommy, slow down
, she tries to shout, because he is driving too fast across the mountainside, they are hitting rocks and dips in the ground, and his beloved old Toyota is being shaken apart. Tommy does not answer because he is not driving – the thing that is driving is no one she knows, and nothing alive – and as she opens her mouth to scream, she opens her eyes as well.

On the small screen in front of her, three children played in a garden, spraying a St Bernard with a hose.

Jayne blinked a few times, trying to focus through the pain. She shifted in her seat and cried out, and her heartbeat set whispers echoing in her ears. Her joints burned, but her vision and other senses were rising from the blackout.
How long?
she wondered, and she turned to the man beside her to ask the time.

He was gone. So were the people across the aisle from them, every seat empty. And past the opposite aisle, more empty seats. She turned and looked between the seat uprights, groaning again at the pain in her stiffened shoulders. No one.

Everyone was gone.

Wake up, Jayne
,
she thought. The guy had dropped his laptop on his seat, and the screen showed a photo of a beautiful woman and two young kids.
Screen saver
, she thought.
How long have I been out?
And if this was still a dream, the woman and kids would have flesh between their teeth.

Her jacket had been sliced off, ragged cuts up the sleeves showing clumsy scissor cuts. Her shirt had been pulled open, her bra sliced in two, and her breasts and stomach were exposed.

‘What the hell . . .?’ she said, and it was when she grabbed her opened shirt to cover herself that she saw the wound on her arm. The dressing had been ripped back and now hung by one strip of tape. The scabbed bite was exposed, seeping a dribble of thin blood.