Coldbrook (Hammer) (46 page)

Coldbrook was abandoned and run-down, and all but silent. There were only her footsteps, shuffled sounds
whispering along a corridor stained with dried blood, scattered with items discarded in panic, the walls pocked with bullet holes here and there. And then there were the bodies.

They stank. The smell filled her nose. She tried breathing through her mouth, but that made it worse.

Pausing at the door of the common room, Holly held her breath and listened.

No footsteps. Nothing moved. Coldbrook’s lighting hummed softly, and deeper down was the constant presence of the core, a sensation more than a noise, betraying itself through the fabric of the place as it had ever since it had first been initiated many years ago.

As she reached for the door, her satphone rang.

‘Shit!’ Startled, she pulled her hand from her wound to go for the phone. Blood had dried against her hand and she ripped part of the padded trouser leg and tied dress away. The pain stabbed through her, and she dropped the gun.

Something banged against the other side of the door. It struck again and again, the lever handle flipping down and up, down and up. The fury was struggling to open the door, some fragmentary memory telling it what to do. Holly stooped for the gun, and then pitched forward as a fainting spell washed over her.
Oh fuck, not like this
, she thought, and as the door creaked open behind her she realised she had lost.

‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ she shouted – pure rage, pure hopelessness, the most defined and lucid moment of her life so close to its end.

The door banged against the wall. Footsteps. She rolled towards the sound and screamed, but the thing stayed silent. The fury tripped over her and struck the ground head first, thrashing like a landed fish for a few seconds as Holly scrambled aside, kicking against it, pushing against the floor until she sat against the wall and the gun was by her side. She grabbed it up and held it in both hands, and then the fury turned to face her.

Sugg. Their chef. A calm, quiet man, he’d spent most of his spare time birdwatching in the mountains above them. Now he looked relatively untouched apart from a terrible bite on his left hand. But Holly knew there was nothing at all human about him, and she shot him in the neck. He fell back, lifted himself again, and she fired into his head. This time he lay still.

Panting as she tried to retain consciousness, Holly realised that the satphone was still ringing in her pocket. ‘Oh Vic, for fuck’s sake,’ she breathed. As she plucked out the phone she heard several sets of running footsteps.

Moira must have released more than three furies.

Holly propped the phone between her knees and aimed along the corridor, back the way she had come.
How many bullets?

The first person around the corner was Drake. He paused, took in the situation, then ran on. Moira came behind him, then several more Gaians. They were armed, sweating, grim-faced, and Holly thought they had been in a fight.

She did not lower the gun.

‘Take one more fucking step,’ she said, voice husky with threat.

Drake raised his crossbow and fired in one fluid movement. From behind him three more bolts blurred along the corridor.

Holly did not even have time to close her eyes before the projectiles struck home.

The fury staggered three more steps through the doorway, bolts protruding from her throat and face. Her mouth worked, and a high keening emerged, something like the strange hooting Holly had heard before. The woman who had been Sam – Coldbrook’s accountant, who had famously arrived at their last Halloween bash dressed as Carrie, complete with a drenching of fake blood – fell close enough for Holly to touch.

‘Any more?’ Drake asked.

Holly sat back against the wall and looked at him from under drooping eyelids. ‘Ask Moira,’ she said. And then they came close and she blacked out, allowing unconsciousness to claim her now that, perhaps, she was safe.

When Holly came to, Drake’s wife Paloma was kneeling beside her, tending her wound, frowning in concentration.

Holly hissed in pain and Paloma glanced up, obviously surprised that she was conscious.

‘Sorry,’ the tall woman said.

‘Right.’ Holly looked down at the gun in her hand. The phone between her knees had stopped ringing. She wondered if she was dreaming this, living a moment that never was as she sank deeper towards death.

‘Do I need to take your weapon?’ Drake asked. He was standing beyond Holly’s feet, between her and the huddled shapes of two dead furies.

‘Yeah. Probably. Fucker.’

Paloma grunted, something noncommittal and impatient.

‘I have to . . . apologise,’ Drake said. He squatted in front of her, coming down to her level. ‘Moira was meant to tie you up, that’s all. When she came back to me she was mortified that—’

‘That she thought she’d killed me?’

‘Moira is in awe of you. And a little scared of you.’ Drake shrugged. ‘We all are.’

His wife unfolded a paper sachet and spread something on the knife wound, and Holly screeched at the sudden shattering pain. Paloma held her hand and squeezed softly, and then the pain faded as quickly as it had arrived.

‘It’ll settle soon,’ Paloma said. ‘The wound isn’t too deep, and I don’t think it’s damaged anything important.’

‘Other than me,’ Holly said.

Paloma’s smile was lopsided. ‘You know what I mean.’

Holly nodded her thanks and the woman stood, backed away, gave Drake room to move in closer. A couple more of his people stood further along the corridor, their backs turned. Holly could no longer see Moira.

‘Well, I suppose I should blow your head off first,’ Holly said. ‘You’re their boss, after all. What have you done to Jonah?’

Drake blinked uncomfortably but did not reply.

‘Is he dead?’ Holly asked.

‘No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know yet. But it doesn’t matter, he’s—’

‘Doesn’t
matter
?’

‘He’s lost to us, Holly. And he’s a brave man.’ Then Drake told her where Jonah had gone, and why.

‘
This
world is his priority!’ Holly said, stunned. But even as she spoke she wondered at the truth of that. Since his wife’s death Jonah had spent his life striving to reach the multiverse,
beyond
this world. His priorities went farther.

‘He’s a complex man,’ Drake said, and in his voice she heard him saying,
As am I
. ‘By doing what he can to stop those bastards – something I’ve craved my whole life – Jonah might save everything.’

‘Or he might destroy the last place that’s protected from this plague,’ Holly said.

Drake inclined his head. ‘Perhaps. But they’re the last world worth saving.’

‘You can arbitrarily decide that?’

‘Yes, I can.’

Holly shook her head.

‘Holly,’ Drake said. ‘Jonah demanded that I come back. His parting wish – his
demand
– was that I should help you and your friends in your vain search for a vaccine.’

‘You think it’s in vain.’

‘You’ve seen Mannan. We’ve discovered nothing.’

‘But you’re not us.’ Holly went to stand, and Drake and Paloma tried to help her. She waved them away. Tucking the gun in her belt and grabbing the phone, she pushed herself up the wall, fighting weakness more than pain. She’d lost blood. But she still had her determination.

She looked down at herself. Bloodied trousers, bra on display, dress tied around her waist. ‘While I’m doing this, maybe you can find me some clothes,’ she said to Paloma. Then she headed into the common room, and Drake followed.

Moira was there, examining coffee machines and juice dispensers on the counter. The short woman glanced her way, but Holly did not acknowledge her presence.

In the garage there were two bodies lying beside the Hummer, and its windows were smashed. Jonah had
fought to block the doorway when the plague had already spread, and it was with that realisation that Holly felt the first stab of sorrow.
I’ll never see him again,
she thought, and she remembered him laughing, talking about things she barely understood and drinking his precious whisky. A complex man, Drake had called him. He didn’t know the half of it.

The keys were still in the vehicle. Holly drove it ten feet from the doorway, wondering whether she was changing anything. Perhaps the fates of whole universes hung on what she was doing right then. Or perhaps nothing mattered at all.

‘That’ll need guarding,’ she said, pointing at the door as she walked back towards the common room. Drake nodded.

Moira was standing by one of the easy chairs where Holly had once sat and talked with her friends and colleagues. She had the look of a cowed dog seeking attention.

Pausing before her, Holly said, ‘Right, then.’

From the garage, soft hooting.

And then came the screams.

All the time Jonah ran, he expected the Inquisitor to appear in front of him and trip him, stun him, carve him
up and implant those grotesqueries that would make him one of its own. But he was starting to think that he was precious to the Inquisitor. He was his world’s chosen one – his reality’s human who would become one of their wretched missionaries – and so perhaps he now held the highest card. He had to submit to his fate in order for the Inquisitor to operate . . . because the being had no wish to harm him.

It would have been funny if it were not so perverse.

So he slowed to a walk, always conscious of the gentle tug drawing him forward, the stronger force pushing him from behind. If he veered aside from the invisible path the sensation would tell him, and he could easily correct his course. He had always been one to take his own route through life, but things were different now. He felt the spike of the alien object nestled against his heart, and the warm flexible globule in his pocket. In many ways he no longer belonged to himself.

Jonah absorbed the experience and relished every sight and sound, though many of them were bad. This world had once been wondrous. It was dead now, haunted by shadows, inhabited by slow-moving things that were easy to outrun. His heart thudded, stumbling frequently, palpitations taking his breath away. He considered the irony of dying now of a heart attack, and thought of the science that the Inquisitors must have to enable them to change him so thoroughly.
You will
never die
, he had been told. If that was the literal truth, then the knowledge and technologies involved were incredible.

And I’m going to kill them all
, he thought. But he couldn’t let any craving for understanding distract him now. It was all so tragic.

He allowed himself to be steered, passing those strange shell-like structures, until he found the breach that must have broken through into
this
world. It rested in a natural dip in the land, and a stream flowed directly into it. Jonah did not even break his step.

The pull that Jonah felt was subtle, the repelling pressure from the world he left huge. Memories struck him as soon as he entered. In many of them, Wendy seemed to exist in other people’s snapshots – walking in the background of a holiday photo, passing a group of people playing frisbee in a park, sitting five tables away in a restaurant as romance blossomed between a couple she would never recall seeing. His heart warmed at the sight of her, and yet the memory of her seemed more remote than ever. And as he emerged into raging snow, he already felt cold and distant.

Jonah had always loved the snow. When he’d been a child it had been something that transformed the South Wales valleys into a kids’ playground, and as an adult it had always reminded him of those times, giving him a glimpse and a memory of home. But emerging into this
other Earth, the shock of dislocation was almost enough to stop his ailing heart and kill him.

He gasped and sat down hard. Flakes settled in his thinning hair and clung to his stubble, dancing in front of his eyes, landing on his tongue. When they melted there they tasted of distances he could never imagine.
I’m leaving a part of myself everywhere I go,
he thought, and it was a strangely comforting idea for someone so rooted in science and reason. Much of this new world might well resemble the one he had left behind, but an understanding was slowly dawning – the more breaches he found and fled through, the further away he was from home.

Then he lifted his head and really looked, and wonder overcame his trauma for a time.

This dark breach was set atop a pedestal in a wide room. The roof was holed in several places, the whole structure charred and warped as if by some huge fire, and the snow swirled through the gaps. Surrounding the breach was a circle of solid desks, half buried by snow but their purpose obvious and thus reminiscent of Coldbrook. Some were barely damaged, others had been melted into grotesque shapes by the fire that must have ruined this place long ago.

The little stream passed around Jonah’s feet and added its contributions of ice to the frozen sculptures that hung from the pedestal.

There were five other pedestals, leading off from his in
a broad curve around the room. Two of them were empty, but the other three supported obsidian globes, depthless black orbs that swallowed the snow and gave back nothing.

‘Bloody hell,’ Jonah muttered into the gusting snow.

Breathing hard, he stepped forward and almost slipped on ice. Carefully, he descended from the pedestal: three steps to the floor, where the snow came up to his shins. He glanced back at the breach he had come through, ready to bring his gun to bear against any threat that presented itself. None of the furies from that world followed him, and neither did the Inquisitor.

There was no movement around him apart from the falling snow. Whatever had befallen this world had occurred long ago, or if it was still going on it was happening elsewhere. The massive holes in the roof seemed to have been punched in, not out, and he imagined the people of this Earth lobbing artillery shells at their Coldbrook facility from a distance in a vain attempt to close the breaches they had made, shut them off from the terrors pouring through. But by then it had already been too late.