Coldbrook (Hammer) (10 page)

‘Holy shit,’ Summerfield said.

‘I know. Wherever she is now—’

‘I can see Moore at the duct housing,’ Summerfield cut in. ‘He touched the maintenance hatch and it fell off. It’s open, Jonah.’

Vic
, Jonah thought,
what the hell have you done?
But he knew. Vic Pearson had stayed true to everything he believed in – his family.

‘Close it,’ Jonah said urgently. ‘Rick, seal that hatch, weld it, bury it in fucking concrete but—’

‘Oh, hang on. Someone’s . . .’

‘Rick?’

‘It’s . . . it’s okay, it’s Alex. He looks—’

‘Rick!’ Jonah shouted. ‘Tell Moore to get back, tell him—’

Jonah heard the distant rattle of gunfire, and then silence, and then Rick Summerfield screamed, ‘Oh my fucking Christ.’

‘Rick? Rick!’ But Rick had gone. Jonah closed his eyes but he couldn’t think straight.
Got to contain it, keep them in, maintain the perimeter
. Already he could hear the static-filled thumping and smashing of glass, as somewhere directly above him the disease spread itself.

He disconnected, but kept hold of the satphone. After so many congratulatory phone calls over the past three days, he would now be the one to spread the devastating news. ‘Contagion,’ he said, practising the word again, and then he dialled.

After breaking the news to three key people on three continents, Jonah switched off the satphone and watched another friend die. Though he tried to he could not close
his eyes. He saw Andy tripped and then pushed against a wall in the electrical plant room, arms thrashing at the mutilated guard holding him there, Motörhead T-shirt slashed and torn and darkened with his blood, eyes wide with panic and terror and disbelief as the guard pressed forward and closed his mouth on Andy’s nose and ripped his head to the side . . . and Jonah could not close his eyes. Here was his legacy, in blood. Here was the result of everything he had thrown himself into for years. The guard bit again and again, and then moved away to let Andy slump to the floor, dead.

It was only as Andy shoved himself upright again, half a minute later, that Jonah looked away.

The temptation to turn off the viewing screens was great. In his seventy-six years he had seen two dead bodies: his dear wife Wendy, prepared and laid to rest, her hair brushed the wrong way and her visage so painfully, terribly still; and Bill Coldbrook, his old friend and boss, whom Jonah had discovered hours after his suicide. Death was no stranger to him, yet it had always been distant.

But he berated himself for his cowardice. He was responsible for Coldbrook, and he had a responsibility for almost forty staff members down here, from the most talented scientist to the canteen cook. He
had
to keep watching the screens to see who would survive and where they would find shelter. After that . . . he did not know.

Jonah kept two of the four screens focused on Control, one zoomed in on the breach, the other encompassing the whole room. It was a dead place. Since he’d locked himself in Secondary fifteen minutes ago he had seen no movement there, though his attention flickered back to those screens every few seconds, drawn by the breach. It looked so harmless. So benign.

What had come through now lay dead on the floor of Control, one of the few motionless bodies he could find. Others, like Andy, moved on, perpetuating the violence and hunting down those as yet untouched. Shocked and confused though he was, Jonah was a scientist, someone who had always retained his sense of wonder. And already he was analysing what he was seeing.

The bites stopped them, they fell, and then they rose again, usually within a minute. The infection – because that was what it had to be – changed them.
Kills them
, he kept thinking, but he was not certain of that yet. Not definite.
Melinda, Satpal
. . . He shook his head. Perhaps the infection dulled pain receptors, did something to their sense of self, and drove them on through pain to . . .

‘Jesus,’ Jonah muttered, because it seemed the horror would never end. There were no microphones on the facility cameras and silence made the carnage more shocking somehow. The picture flickered and settled on the canteen, apparently still and peaceful until a naked
man pulled himself up on one of the dining tables, his throat a ragged mess, his chest scored by scratch marks, and ran quickly from the room.

The image flicked to the kitchen. There was no one there and no movement, and then there was a thrashing at one edge of the screen, someone moving just out of shot, their shadow thrown across the room by harsh fluorescents, and a spray of blood splashed across the previously pristine food-preparation surface.

The large garage area: unsettlingly still, three big vehicles sitting like soldiers awaiting orders. He scanned the image, trying to work out what was wrong with what he saw but unable to find anything.
Just that it’s so still
.

One of the accommodation hallways: no movement, but a heavy smear of blood along one wall, and something that looked like bloody clothing piled against a closed door. Jonah counted three out of eight doors that were still closed. There were no cameras inside the rooms. Invasion of privacy. He wished he could reach through and knock on those doors, but if there was anyone inside left alive they would surely not answer.

A second accommodation hallway: and the shock of what he saw made him flinch back in his seat. At the far end of the hallway, thirty feet from the camera, bodies thrashed and fought, maybe seven or eight of them. He saw the flash of several gunshots and one body flipped back. A man leaned from a doorway and aimed down at
the body, shooting three more times. He retreated back into the room and the light changed as the door slammed, and then the body stood again and started throwing itself against the door. Its chest was a ragged mess. It wore a nightdress, and Jonah thought its foot had been torn apart until he realised it was a fluffy rabbit slipper.

Jonah changed views to a storeroom close to the gym. Estelle and Uri were huddled together in a corner, the guard who’d left with them crouching behind the locked door. Jonah could see their careful movements to ease pressure on bent limbs, their heavy breathing as fear refused to loosen its grip on them. Uri glanced up at the camera, then back at Estelle. He was holding her tightly. She held him too. Uri used to juggle during his lunch breaks to settle his nervous disposition, and Estelle had a quotation handy for most occasions. Jonah wondered what she would come up with for this one but he could see that she was silent.

He checked the list of camera locations displayed on the laptop before him and entered a code for the fourth screen. It was a view of the short storage-area corridor, and it was full of dead people.

Dead people
, Jonah thought.
Is that right? How can they be dead? They’re not fucking zombies, so they must be . . .?
But he had seen the damage inflicted on some of these people. Even if they
were
infected with a contagion that subdued pain and turned them into berserkers,
they could not function drained of blood, or with shredded muscles or cracked bones, or—

Leave that for later
, he thought.

There were seven people in the corridor and all of them were standing still. Their wounds flickered slightly on-screen: wet, open, but no longer bleeding. He knew all their names but tried not to think of them. They seemed to be listening, waiting. They knew what was behind the door.

In the storeroom, the guard seemed to be whispering to Uri and Estelle. Jonah wished he could hear, because he had a terrible sense of what was about to happen.

How the hell can I speak to them?
he wondered. He tapped at the laptop, bringing up schematics of the facility and turning around to view them on the large wall behind him. He glanced at some of the folding chairs the guard had opened up, thought,
There should be people sitting there now
, and then tried to concentrate. Fire alarm? Lighting system? Anything he could control from here to give them warning, because the guard was growing impatient.

Jonah thought he might open the door.

‘Damn it,
damn
it!’ His heart fluttered and he coughed, and he cursed his
advancing years
. He’d never thought of himself as infirm, though he had never been one to deny the onset of age. Now, though, he wished he were a younger man. A younger man might leave the room
with a makeshift weapon – a chair leg, or a strut from beneath the table – and try to fight his way down one level to the storeroom, stop whatever was about to happen. But Jonah didn’t think his heart would take it.

Besides, his was a greater responsibility. He glanced at the breach again and guilt weighed heavy on him. All that planning and all those precautions – and Control’s lockdown had still failed.

On the screen, the guard rested his hand on the door handle. Uri was shaking one hand at him, leaning forward to speak in his ear, but Estelle held him back, not wishing to relinquish contact. The guard waved them away without even looking. In his right hand he held his sub-machine gun, aimed directly at the door.

On the next screen there was a shimmer of movement through the assembled bloodied people, as if the picture had skipped several frames.

‘No!’ Jonah screamed. ‘Leave the door alone!’ It was a cry of impotence, a useless gesture, and he was not used to such things. His blood raged, and he clenched his fists and thumped the desk as the guard worked the handle.

The sudden movement on the next screen was startling. Any suspicion that Jonah had about them waiting together as a group vanished instantly when all seven people surged at the door. They clawed past each other, shoving, thrusting forward, and on the storeroom screen
he saw the door burst open and the guard disappear beneath an avalanche of bodies.

Estelle and Uri drew back, pressing past boxes and causing them to tumble down around them. For a moment Jonah was unsure what the falling, streaming things were, but then he knew: toilet paper, a hundred rolls unfurling and bouncing around the small room, quickly turning dark as they soaked up the blood already being spilled.

Uri kicked and punched, Estelle grabbed someone around the throat, and there was a flash as a gun fired. Jonah did not want to see, but he had to watch. He had to learn. Something was happening here that needed witnessing and he concentrated, biting his lip and trying to pretend that the blood and death he saw was only a movie. But Uri was his friend, and seeing him fall beneath two ravening people, seeing their heads darting up and down as they bit, could not be ignored so easily. And Estelle. He saw her throwing toilet rolls at someone so bloodied and mutilated that Jonah could not identify them – and then that someone pressed in and gnawed off part of Estelle’s face. He could not pretend that was make-believe. The blood and silent screams were real; the sight of people who should be dead acting like a pack of starving dogs was painfully, impossibly real.

‘What have I done?’ Jonah said aloud and he thought of Bill Coldbrook slumped dead in his chair, the empty
sleeping-pill bottle on the floor beside him. Had he known? Impossible: he couldn’t have, because if he had surely he would have—

Jonah thought of the dreams, the thing in his room, how he’d actually felt the feather-touch of its finger lifting his eyelid. ‘They were dead, too,’ he muttered, remembering the shambling people in his nightmares, the bitten man being whisked away by a machine like none he had ever seen before.

Jonah closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the terrible images so that he could gather his thoughts. But they were loose and elusive, shocked apart by this terrible reality.

He looked again and the guard was on his feet, backed into the corner beneath the camera. Jonah saw only the sub-machine gun and the man’s hand and forearm, and the screen flashed five more times until the bullets ran out. The attackers jerked and danced at the bullets struck them, but only two fell. One stood up again, his hand scratching at his chest as if he was irritated by a fly bite. The other, Estelle, stayed down, the top of her head blown off. And Jonah concentrated on her as the shapes pressed in below the camera and the guard met his end, waiting for her to move again. She did not. Her eyes were open, looking lifeless through the lens.

‘Blew her head off,’ he muttered.

He steeled himself, then ran through the facility’s cameras one more time. Three out of twenty-three had ceased working, but on every other screen he saw only those mad people walking – he could tell by the blood, and their injuries, and their slack faces, and the way their arms failed to swing as they moved that they were not merely survivors – and a few motionless. He tried to zoom in on these, but the angles were wrong, and picture quality worsened the further in a camera zoomed. Only on one of the bodies did he see clear evidence of severe head trauma.

Jonah started to shake. Could they
all
be infected?
Everyone
? There were places to hide in Coldbrook’s three levels: cupboards and locked rooms, nooks and crannies, empty spaces left over from construction of the underground facility more than twenty years before. And those three closed doors in one of the accommodation corridors – maybe survivors were hiding in there. If so, he hoped they were people who had seen what those infected – those bitten – could do. Otherwise they might be tempted to open their doors.

He glanced at the reinforced viewing window in Secondary’s single door, but there was no face there looking in.
I’ll have to leave sometime
, he thought, and fear shivered through him. He breathed deeply and tried to pull himself together. Panic could help no one, least of all him. The news would be spreading beyond
Coldbrook by now. His new aim must be only to stay alive and gather whatever information he could.

Vic heard gunshots. They were
shooting
at him! He flung himself into the ditch beside the road and felt cool slick mud closing around his arm and hand. The palmtop slipped from his pocket and splashed into the mud. He panicked, trying to prevent himself sinking deeper. The muck stank, but he welcomed the smell because it meant he was outside. Down in Coldbrook the air was sterile and clean, but to Vic it always smelled artificial. Real air was tainted by life, and he was glad to be free.