Coldbrook (Hammer) (15 page)

A whisper in the distance, and then the shape fell with something protruding from its head. The man who had run into the forest minutes before emerged behind the fallen creature. When he reached where it had fallen he pulled a machete from his belt and hacked down once, hard. Then he came back down to them, following the same route that the shambling creature had been taking. When he was closer he held up one thumb – an amazingly human gesture, which produced a shocked gasp of surprise from Holly – and they set off once more.

I want Jonah
, Holly thought, shivering even though the day was growing warmer.
I want Vic
. The pain in her head was growing into the worst headache she could remember, and she wondered whether the blow to her skull had damaged her more than she knew.

They reached the valley floor. It was only sparsely wooded here and they followed a track that ran alongside a stream. It was barely a trickle, though its route was marked by a deep gulley with sheer sides, and Holly guessed it must be prone to flooding. The landscape was terribly familiar, its features like an elusive memory. Beside the track at irregular intervals stood the vertical trunks, thin and grey, of what looked like amputated trees. She thought perhaps they were birch or some similar species, but every one was broken off within a
few feet of the ground. She stared at each of them as they passed, and then just as they turned from the track that might once have been a road she realised what they were. Telegraph poles.

‘I know this road,’ she whispered, and the woman glanced back at her. Holly thought she’d be scolded but the woman’s face seemed less severe now, and the rest of the party seemed to be moving more casually.
A couple of miles south of Coldbrook, old mountain track, upgraded to cater for the Appalachians’ increasing tourist trade. And now . . .

As they approached a small ravine that joined the valley they passed through more ruins. Holly propped herself up and took notice, because that word from the tumbled pile of rubble where these people had found her kept echoing back:
Exit
. She hoped that the ruins might tell her more. But their plant-clogged windows only prompted endless questions.

Passing into the ravine, Holly looked up at the sloping sides and the segment of sky above. It was darker in here, and she doubted whether the sun’s rays ever penetrated this far. The ground was marshy, and a dozen small waterfalls trickled down the sides. Their sound was soporific, and as she closed her eyes she felt the pain easing slightly. To sleep now . . .

But she needed to pee – more urgently now – and to find out where she was. And most of all she had to work out how to get back to Coldbrook.

Something clanked, metal on metal, cutting through her daydream, and it was so loud and sudden that she cried out. Set in the ravine’s side was a metal door, its frame an uneven wall of solid concrete. Layers of rust camouflaged the door, but as it swung open she sensed that it was more solid and secure than it looked.

Several people emerged, and it was the last one to come out who commanded her attention. He was tall and thin, and he carried no weapons. A child stood behind him, a little girl, peering around his legs at Holly, fascinated. The tall man was pale, like an underground thing.
Their leader
, she thought, and she smiled softly at wherever that idea had come from. The little girl smiled back. Holly was already starting to suspect that she had been wrong in her assessment of these people.

The woman who had been at Holly’s side stepped forward, and she and the man briefly touched hands. He never for an instant took his stare from Holly. He was sizing her up.

‘She came through,’ the woman said, and Holly caught her breath. She could communicate with these people. Her eyes went wide and she could feel tears prickling their corners. She looked around at the others – still silent, watching. Then she stood up slowly from the stretcher, biting her lip against the pain singing through her skull. She smoothed down her clothes and opened her mouth to speak, but thirst had dried her voice.

‘So I see,’ the man said, and there was something about the voice that Holly recognised. This all felt suddenly dreamlike, and for the first time in her life she put the cliché into action and pinched the back of her hand. But she did not wake up.

‘How do you feel?’ the man asked.

‘Head hurts,’ Holly said. ‘And I need to pee.’ She almost smiled. What an auspicious introduction to another world.

‘Sorry about your head,’ the man said. ‘Precautionary. We’d been watching, and we didn’t know quite what to expect.’ He stood to one side as if allowing her to pass, and the little girl fled back through the doorway.

‘In there?’ Holly asked. From inside she smelled the faint hint of cooking meat, and heard the distant jangle of music. And then she saw the small logo on his jacket – three intersecting circles, their overlapping areas shaded black. She recognised it from the back of the jacket of one of her rescuers.

And she recognised it from home.

‘In there,’ the man confirmed. ‘Welcome to Coldbrook.’

In the end, they drove to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Tommy knew how much Jayne loved it up there, and the weather gave them a long, dry day of
walking and picnicking, talking and being in love. He frequently surprised her with such gestures, and sometimes in his company she went for hours without being reminded of her illness. She’d forget herself under the spell of his kindness. He always waved off any comments, saying,
It’s what you do for someone you love
. But she always made certain that he knew how much she appreciated everything he did, and every small part of him, because she never wanted to take him for granted. And the gratitude was for herself as much as for him, a reminder of where she was and how important Tommy was to her well-being. If she didn’t thank him, she feared that she would lose her way.

She knew that she was lucky to have Tommy, and at least once each day she experienced a mortal fear of what would happen should that luck desert her.

Walking back towards Tommy’s battered old Toyota, holding his hand, Jayne’s discomfort was just beginning to grow as the sinking afternoon sun started to lengthen their shadows. The day was already a pleasing memory. Some days lived for ever; she never usually knew that when they were happening, but some time after she would realise that they had been among the best days of her life.

Jayne’s mother was still alive, somewhere, and the only time there was true tension between her and Tommy was when he suggested that they should get in touch.
Didn’t you
see
her?
she’d ask him, never quite shouting, never truly calm.
You have no idea. No concept of what I went through before I met you
. And he’d let it lie because he knew it would do no good. Jayne had made that very clear from the start; she was on her own, two thousand miles from where she’d been born, and her family had died with her brother. He’d been a small-time criminal, dragged into the LA gang culture and found dead at the age of seventeen with a bullet in the back of his skull and his genitals cut off. The coroner hadn’t been able to tell whether the mutilation was post-mortem, and Jayne had the impression that no one cared. One less gang-banger, one less headache for the LAPD. And when her mother had received the phone call she’d hung up, drunk another bottle of wine, and told Jayne later that evening when she arrived home from school.

Johnny’s dead, hon. Can you fetch your mother another bottle?

Why didn’t you call me!?

What good woulda that done?

Johnny!

He knew how it’d end up. I told him often enough. Now get your mother another bottle, hon.

Another bottle, and another, was the way it had been going, and the way it continued from then until Johnny’s sad funeral. Three fuckers had shown up an hour after the last mourners had left, when Jayne was still kneeling
beside her only brother’s grave watering the soil with her tears. They’d sauntered past her and stood beside the grave, then pulled pistols and fired three quick shots as some sort of fucked-up salute. Jayne had stood to run after them, beat some sense into their twisted, drug-addled brains, but her legs had folded beneath her as her muscles cramped, driving wedges of pain into her brain. They’d laughed as they ran away, and she’d woken later with paramedics tending her along with the old lady who’d found her and was fussing around nearby.

Next day, she’d remained at home long enough to pack some clothes and steal a thousand dollars from her mother’s back-drawer stash. Then she’d called her school sweetheart Tommy and told him she was leaving LA to live with her cousin in Birmingham, England.

‘It’s been a lovely day,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Only did it ’cos I want a blow job tonight.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Jayne laughed, and the freeing of tension lessened the pains in her neck.
Complete relaxation is the key
, one specialist had told her, while another had said
Exercise as much as you can, gently and often
. Walking in the hills with her love gave her the best of both options.

When Tommy had said he’d come with her, she’d seen a whole new future opening up. They’d got as far as Knoxville, fallen in love with the place, and stayed. On days like today she was living in that future, bright and
secure as if she awaited the fate of a normal person, not someone destined to die young. The churu was an insidious beast, kept at bay by a morning massage while it ate away at her from inside.

‘No, I mean it,’ Tommy said, mock serious. ‘I need head. I’ll be sitting on the sofa, and you can have a floor cushion so you’re comfortable.’ He took a small tin from his pocket and extracted a ready-rolled joint. ‘Hands free.’ He tucked the joint in the corner of his mouth, a poor James Dean. ‘Then if you’re lucky, baby, I’ll return the favour.’

‘Nah.
American Idol
’s on tonight.’

The joint tilted groundward. ‘A man knows where he stands.’

‘Yeah.’ Jayne squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back before letting go to light up. She turned away to look down over the hillside towards the car park and the lowlands beyond. The trees cast complex afternoon shadows and in the distance she could just make out the haze of Knoxville. Closer by were several smaller towns they’d driven through on the way here, set in the landscape like diamonds on felt. She caught a whiff of pot and walked a few steps, trying to blink away the memory of Johnny. Usually she could successfully avoid dwelling on the past, even when Tommy’s smoke took her back home for a few brief, intense seconds. But today Johnny grinned at her and showed her his latest
gang tattoo, a mark he’d got for robbing a drugstore the previous week. There was pride in his smile, and disgust in her voice as she chided him, though now she couldn’t even remember the words. Her memories were tainted by the alcohol haze of their mother as she breezed into the room, unaware of either of her children’s lives.

‘Sorry,’ Tommy said. ‘I know you don’t like it.’ He held her arm, having already inhaled most of the joint and stamped it out.

‘You know you never need to apologise,’ Jayne said, and she meant it. Tommy’s need and her own history were different animals, and if they ever met and fought that was her concern, not his.

The view was gorgeous. There were still twenty or more cars in the car park, their owners walking the hillsides or lighting barbecues in the picnic area a quarter of a mile to the north. She could see a few people down by the cars, hanging around the vehicles’ open doors as if to put off leaving for as long as possible. And she knew why. Maybe lots of people came to this beauty spot to escape something else, and the process of going back always dampened an otherwise bright day.
Not everyone’s sad
, she thought, and as ever that idea shocked her. Was she sad? She liked to think not, but sometimes her friend Ellie would have a glass too much wine and tell her she carried sadness around like a haze.
Not a cloud
, she would say,
not like someone can see, but . . . like heat haze. I
see you through it and you’re distorted. Not the woman you want to be, but the woman you really are. Sad
. Jayne would tell her to fuck off, then pour another glass for them both. But these infrequent yet serious statements from Ellie stuck with her, nestling in her subconscious to sabotage moments like now.

‘I’m not sad,’ Jayne said.

‘Well, good.’

‘I mean it. I’m not.
We
’re not.’

‘Hell, no!’ Tommy said. She saw the twinkle in his eyes from the pot, the lazy smile that he’d keep for the rest of the journey home, and longer if he smoked some more.

She grabbed Tommy and pulled him close, hugging him tight, tenderness beyond a kiss. ‘Take me home and let’s see about that sofa.’

‘Your wish is my command.’

‘As ever.’

They walked down the hillside holding hands, following a rough path that had been worn through the trees by thousands of feet over many years. The churu was biting in now, grating her knees and ankles and setting fires in her hips which would simmer and burn for the rest of the evening, but she was determined not to let it spoil the day.

From somewhere distant, a loud explosion.

‘What was that?’ Jayne asked.

‘Beats me.’ Tommy nodded towards the car park, two hundred feet downhill from them. ‘They heard it, too.’ People were standing still, and some of them were pointing north at the road that wound away from the car park and up towards the more heavily wooded mountains.

Jayne saw where the narrow road passed the car park before it was swallowed behind a screen of trees and a fold in the land. She felt a twinge of unease.

‘Backfire,’ Jayne said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

‘What’s the matter, babe?’ Tommy could hear the strain in her voice, always could. With him she could never feign comfort when she was in pain. ‘It startin’ in early tonight?’

‘It’s not that,’ she said. A man had walked to the end of the car park and seemed to be on his mobile phone, and he turned to wave back at his wife standing by their car.