Coldbrook (Hammer) (26 page)

‘It’s spreading fast,’ the stewardess told Sean. ‘There’s martial law across five states. I’ve got a friend who works in the NYPD and they’re getting ready to isolate Manhattan. And, from everything I’ve seen on YouTube and the news channels, it infects you in minutes.’

‘Any cases of bites not turning anyone?’ Sean asked.

‘Hey,’ the stewardess said, her smile forced, ‘that’d be
good
news. You think the media would want any of that right now?’

Sean glanced back at Jayne, and she saw the man tense as if ready to make a grab for the gun. She opened her eyes wider, nodded past Sean, and he turned back quickly. The tension relaxed as quickly as it had built.

‘Why are we going back?’ Sean asked. The aircraft had completed its turn – the moonlight was shining through different windows now.

The stewardess seemed uncomfortable, and Jayne realised that none of the other passengers knew either.

‘So why?’ the man prompted.

‘They won’t let us land,’ she said. ‘UK air-traffic control says they’re scrambling the RAF to turn back any North American flights.’

‘And they threatened to shoot us down if we don’t comply?’ Sean said. The stewardess didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

Sean started backing along the aisle, but the stewardess stayed where she was, watching them go and giving Jayne a half-smile.

‘A deep bite?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Jayne said, joining the conversation for the first time.

‘It drew blood?’

Jayne nodded.

‘And you’re sure the person who bit you was . . .?’

‘I’m sure,’ Jayne said. ‘Then I shut myself in a car. She . . .
it
looked in. Then left.’ More pain flared through her hips, and she pulled herself upright, groaning at the effort.

‘There’s food and drink back there,’ the stewasdess said. ‘Look in compartment six. Some nice salads.’

‘Thanks,’ Sean said. ‘Will you tell us when we’re close?’

‘About three hours.’ She glanced back over her shoulder, then lowered her voice. ‘I think some of them might come for her before then.’

Sean nodded his thanks, and he and Jayne watched the stewardess disappear behind the curtain again.

‘If they come?’ Jayne asked.

‘No one’s going to walk into a bullet,’ he said.

‘You’d really shoot them?’

She saw doubt and fear in what she’d previously thought were the eyes of a strong guy. She guessed Sean was around fifty, stocky and fit, and he had scars – two parallel wounds on his left cheek, pale against his dark skin. She might ask about them, given time.

‘’S long as
they
think I will, we’ll be okay.’

‘I might be immune,’ she said. ‘What if I am?’

‘How rare is that disease of yours?’

Jayne nodded slowly as understanding dawned, and Sean sat in the seat across from her, leaning out so that he could see along the aisle.

‘Fuck,’ he said softly.

Jonah knew that this was action for the sake of it. But sitting in Secondary in the dark with nothing to do would drive him mad, so coming back down to Control was at
least something to occupy his mind.
Nothing will have changed
, he thought. He slid the gun into his waistband and pulled back the chairs he’d propped beneath the door’s handle. As he opened the door, something whispered behind him.

Jonah whirled around and shone his torch back along the corridor. The wall was smeared with dried blood, black in the artificial light. Nothing moved.

‘Is that you?’ he said. Nothing answered. ‘Bastard!’

He was talking to shadows.

He tugged the door open and stepped inside Control. It was cooler than the rest of Coldbrook. The air held a hint of something alien to this place – flowing water, soil, healthy plants. He breathed in and held his breath: the scents of another world were startling. Previously the containment field had kept the two worlds separate, but Holly had switched it off to go through.
Holly is through there
, he thought, staring at the breach. It glowed gently in the torchlight.

Moths fluttered in the light, creatures from elsewhere. Their presence took his breath away.

He’d thought seriously about going through, but not yet. He could not abandon his world while there still might be a chance for it. So he stood just inside the door and aimed the torch around the room, switching to wide beam so that shadows could not hide for too long. A few flies buzzed in the light. The moths spiralled
in confusion, dusting the beam. The withered creature still lay where it had fallen.

And that was when the dark started talking at last.

‘It hurts when you pass through.’

Jonah gasped and pressed himself against the glass wall. He shone the torch this way and that, tracking its beam with the gun.

‘But pain purifies.’ The voice was low and wet. ‘It purges the old. Emphasises the new. The pain is necessary. There is so much more to come.’

Jonah swung left, and when he turned back the man stood in front of him, several paces away and different from before. He still held the pulsing red organ, its tendrils stirring as the light hit them, but his other hand had removed part of his mask to speak. His newly exposed lips were as pale as dead fish, the flesh around his mouth smooth and speckled with moisture. He pressed the mask back across his mouth and Jonah heard a pained inhalation. Steam hazed the air. Then the man removed it again to speak some more.

‘I am the Inquisitor, and you will be prepared and instructed.’ His teeth were rotted, black and cracked, and a faint mist seemed to issue from his throat.

Jonah raised the gun and aimed, but the man merely pressed his mask back against his mouth. He had yet to expose his eyes. Jonah flicked the torch this way and
that, trying to get its light to penetrate the goggles. They glittered wet and dark.

Jonah lowered the gun, backed to the doorway and slipped through, never taking his gaze from the man. He followed.

‘This world is dead,’ the Inquisitor said. ‘You are honoured, because for you it is the beginning.’

‘This world is
not
dead!’ Jonah said, surprised at the forcefulness in his voice.

The intruder breathed in heavily once again, hissing softly as he exhaled.

Jonah flipped the torch around to check the corridor, and when he turned back the man had gone. A light mist hung in the air where he had been.

‘Where are you?’ Jonah whispered. ‘Inquisitor. Bastard.’ Control was silent, the corridor behind him whispering once again with scratching echoes of the dead.

Jonah stacked the chairs against the door, slid down the wall and nursed the torch. He remained there for some time, because that place was as safe as any.

The zombies surged by, and none of them had eyes for Holly. They were hideous. Many appeared unharmed and unchanged, apart from the blankness in their eyes
and the sense of terrible purpose in their actions. Some had been wounded, and the injuries were many and varied – bullet holes, knife wounds, scrapes and gouges, burns, crush injuries, impact marks. Some were naked, some were in their nightclothes, others wore uniforms, suits, or casual clothing. The one thing that united them, other than the empty eyes, was the blood.

It was smeared across their mouths and jaws, their chins and throats and chests. These creatures had been biting, and they were seeking more.

Holly started backward, but Moira held her still.

‘Be calm,’ Moira said.

The zombies flickered from view, only to be replaced by more, and Holly realised that she was looking at a projection. The room was large and dim, the atmosphere heavy with moisture, and there were things in there that she could not comprehend.

The projection point of view shifted, turning to follow the path that the zombies were taking. The image splashed with something wet, and when it cleared she saw a long straight street, lined on each side with tall buildings. One of the buildings was on fire – people at the higher windows were shouting and waving. Their voices must have been desperate, but she could hear nothing. This was a vision only, and for that she was glad.

The street was jammed with zombies, and they were
being cut down by gunfire from further along the street. Many of them stood up again and carried on running, or hobbling, or crawling if their legs or hips or spines had been destroyed. Many more – those shot in the head – stayed down.

The view suddenly shifted as whatever was observing this chaos climbed on top of an overturned car. And from higher up the sight was even more astounding.

The street was barricaded with a line of tanks parked side by side next to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Their big turret guns pointed along the street, but it was their machine guns that were doing the damage, raking left and right and making the air in front of them shimmer with heat and smoke. The silhouette of a helicopter gunship came quickly into view above them as it passed over the barricade and opened fire.

They were zombies, yet the devastation wrought upon their bodies was shocking. Holly wanted to turn away but found that she could not. She was riveted. She had the sense that she would have to see this eventually so she might as well go through with it
now
, see it all
now
.

The helicopter hovered over the street and its guns swivelled on their mountings. Glass shattered, raining down from the tall buildings, bodies were ripped apart, and then the helicopter turned towards her point of view, and Holly whined a little, trying to edge back.

‘It’s not happening here,’ Moira whispered in her ear.

The image flashed yellow, and then white, and then it became a pattern of falling snow on the air. Beyond the faded image, panting slightly where she lay on a clear fluid bed, a woman grasped at the air as if to hold the last drifting flakes.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Holly said.

‘Take a breath, Holly,’ Drake said. ‘And look around. This is the heart of our Coldbrook.’

Holly looked closer. The woman wore a simple robe similar to a hospital gown and lay on a large flexible bed that was moulded perfectly to her body. Above her, where the image had seemed to be projected onto the air, hung a framework of clear loose pipes. They looked like unobstructed flows of water, but Holly guessed they were held in place and shape by whatever forces contained the clear bed. Leading up from the framework into the ceiling were thicker pipes, dark and solid. Small sparks flared and died along them, leaving the surfaces and performing tight orbits before fading away. She stretched up to get a better look, but Moira touched her on the shoulder.

‘Don’t get too close.’

‘Is she the one who . . .?’ the prone woman asked.

‘Her name’s Holly,’ Drake said.

‘That was my world,’ Holly said softly, pointing to where a vague haze still hung in the air. ‘So she was there, seeing it? My world?’

‘I’m so sorry, Holly,’ the woman said, and she averted her eyes as if ashamed.

‘What is all this?’ Holly asked.

‘Our version of what you called a breach,’ Drake said. ‘There’s more to see. Gayle?’ Drake asked.

‘About seventy miles north-west of here,’ the woman said softly.

‘That all came from what happened in Coldbrook?’ Holly asked. But no one answered, because they knew she was coming to terms with what she’d just seen.

‘We can show you more,’ Drake said, nodding towards the rest of the room. Heavy curtains hung as dividers, but beyond Gayle – the woman still lying meekly in front of her – Holly could now make out variations in the room’s lighting, and colours beyond those curtains.

‘More?’ she said. And though what she had seen was terrible, she nodded and followed Drake.

Spread throughout the large room were men, women, and some children, perhaps a dozen in total. Half of them were twitching in their fluid beds while images played in the air above them. The projection’s outer extremes would flex and bend, pipes leading up into the ceiling sparking and whipping from some unseen influence, and the sleepers were connected to the screens with more of those fluid connections, watery snakes squirming through the air. The remaining people lay in deep slumbers. They all looked exhausted, and Holly
wondered briefly whether they were here against their wills. But Gayle had apologised to her, and she’d heard a level of admiration in Drake’s voice. Maybe these were the only people in Gaia’s Coldbrook who were able to do this. And whatever these devices were, they showed her how her own world was dying. Though the images were silent, she could imagine every scream of pain and roar of destruction.

She saw a field, crops trampled by hundreds of running people. In the distance she could just make out the first regular shapes of buildings, the only taller structure a church spire. They were running towards a small town.

Rushing through an indoor market, stalls crashing and crushed, jewellery and paintings, books and pots, sculptures and other craft items trampled into the floor, as sellers and customers alike were caught and bitten.

And then she saw the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. One of her favourite buildings, now it had bodies scattered on the lawns, windows smashed, and smears of blood across its light brown façade. People were rushing from the main entrance, and she knew what they all were.

It was then that Holly realised that these sights were viewed through a zombie’s eyes. Somehow, the people lying around her were seeing the downfall of her Earth through the eyes of monsters.

‘How does this work?’ she asked. ‘Where is your breach generator? I don’t understand.’

‘You walk into our world from another, and
you
don’t understand?’ Drake said.

‘But these things . . . this technology.’

‘Quantum bridges. I’ve read my father’s notes, and he handed down most of his knowledge. Once they learned how to stabilise micro-black holes in the lab they could draw through gravity lines. You thought we were backward?’

‘No, no,’ Holly said. But perhaps she had in the beginning, just a little. She’d seen bows and arrows, basic clothing, and people living in holes in the ground.

‘Come with me,’ Drake said. ‘It’s best not to talk too much in the casting room. It’s tiring work, and sometimes to watch it can be . . .’ He shrugged.