Coldbrook (Hammer) (54 page)

Marc was right. They were running out of time.

‘Still want to slit my throat?’

Marc jumped a little, then sighed and rested back in the chair. ‘It’s not over yet. I said I won’t kill you until it’s over.’

‘Define “over”.’

‘Yeah.’ Marc stood and stretched, his joints creaking. The desk he’d requisitioned in Secondary was piled with printouts, the laptop stood open, and the satphone was plugged in to recharge.

‘So when will you be ready to begin?’ Vic asked.

‘I
have
begun.’ Marc pointed at the printed sheets. ‘I understand about thirty per cent of that.’

Vic flicked through papers, read lines here and there, saw formulae, tables, and some words he had never heard of – some of the phrases were in English and yet
alien to him. He touched the laptop’s pad and the screen lit up, revealing a dozen unread emails. He saw that they’d come in over the past few minutes.

‘All these people are trying to help?’ Vic said.

‘It’s going to take for ever,’ Marc said. ‘It’s daunting. It’s scary how much I don’t know. I told Holly, and she didn’t seem to accept that very well. And there’s one thing I haven’t told anyone. About Jayne and Mannan.’

‘What’s that?’ Vic asked.

‘I think they need to mate. Conceive. I think it’s their child that might provide the cure.’

‘But that’s . . .’ Vic said, aghast.

‘I know. Maybe years.’

‘I wasn’t even thinking timescale.’

‘You see my problem,’ Marc said.

‘Coldbrook won’t last,’ Vic said. ‘They’ll get in somehow. We’re taking a breather, but everyone in the garage is twitchy, listening to those things in the duct. Soon we’ll have to move again, and from then there’s only one way to go.’

‘I know that, too.’

Vic turned and looked at the blank screens, seeing himself and Marc reflected there. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll tell them all tomorrow.’

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘Everyone deserves a day of hope.’

Jayne surfaced slowly, eyes still closed, and she knew that Sean was still in the room with her. She felt his influence; she felt safe.

‘Hey, you awake?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. How’d you know?’

‘You’ve stopped snoring.’

‘I do not snore.’

‘Damn right you do. I thought it was an alarm, or something. Been banging the air conditioning, trying to get it to shut up. Dogs for miles around—’

‘Way to labour a point,’ Jayne said, and opened her eyes. Sean was sitting across from her, leaning back in a chair with his feet on a small desk. The room had belonged to a guy called Jonah who wasn’t here any more, and the others seemed to hold him in high regard. There were books on every surface, and an old photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman on the desk. Sean had been careful not to disturb anything.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘Six hours. Since we got in, pretty much.’

‘You slept?’ she asked, but she knew the answer to that.

‘Couldn’t.’ He shrugged.

‘So what’d I miss?’

‘That woman Holly came to visit. That’s all. I think everyone’s just . . .’

‘Taking a breath,’ Jayne said.

‘Yeah. So how do you feel?’

‘Bit better.’ That was a lie. She didn’t feel better at all, but she found that she could move more easily than before, straightening her limbs, pushing herself upright so that she was leaning against the wall. Holly had given her some powerful painkillers, and she’d had a restful sleep. The light comas were more exhausting than staying awake through the pain.

‘So this Drake character,’ Sean said. ‘He’s sent two of his people back over. Through. Whatever. Sent them back to fetch the drugs that might help you.’

‘Marc is afraid that it’ll affect his experiments.’

‘And that’s what you are now? An experiment?’

Jayne smiled, and for the first time in days it did not hurt her face. ‘Sean, I owe you everything. Everything. And because I owe you, then I want a lot more people to owe you, too. I’m immune, and if Marc can make anything of that – a cure, a vaccine – you’ll be the one who helped save the world.’

‘Huh!’ Sean shook his head.

‘You’re so sweet,’ she said.

He didn’t look at her, and Jayne knew why. She could see his daughter in his eyes, sometimes even when he was looking right at Jayne herself. She wasn’t a replacement, not even an equal. Maybe they’d talk about it one day.

‘I have to do what I can,’ Jayne said. ‘I’ll take whatever Marc gives me, and give what he needs to take.’

‘Even if it means you’ll die?’ Sean asked.

‘Everyone dies.’

Jonah had never been to Italy. Wendy had always wanted to go, but for some reason something always got in the way. Usually his work. Now he was there, Roman sun warming his skin and the layer of matter that had been sprayed there through the doorway. If he looked up at the sky, with its wispy clouds and light blue depths, everything could almost be all right.

He was in line with his Inquisitor, and close-up he felt distant from all those other naked people. Some were distinctly human, others less so – higher-browed, taller, more heavily muscled. On distant Earths, along the string of universes, evolution had taken different tracks. As well as making them all appear vulnerable, the nakedness was also a barrier of sorts, making them ironically less than human in Jonah’s eyes.

Perhaps part of it was that he knew he would be killing them all – soon. All these people brought from their Earths and their Coldbrooks, perhaps the last of their lines, chosen by their Inquisitors to oversee the infection of a new world, and he would turn them all into zombies. He
would be wiping out so much intelligence, so much rich ambition and original thought and probing philosophy.

So it was easier to look at the ground or the sky, or the looming, grand buildings that would witness the culmination of his and Drake’s plan.

The curved walls and grand columns around St Peter’s Square had been covered with small writing, and he was too far away to read it. Perhaps it was scripture, or this world’s perverted version of what scripture should be. Higher up he saw planes’ contrails crossing the sky, the aircraft themselves moving incredibly quickly. Objects that he’d thought at first were birds hovered over the square, flitting here and there, and they glinted where they caught the sun. He guessed that they might be airborne cameras, and he averted his stare in case someone perceived his intent.

Men and women in colourful uniforms – orange, yellow, blue – stood at seemingly random points around the square, both at the edges and close to the central obelisk and fountain. They were in pairs or small groups, chatting and lounging against statues or walls, but Jonah sensed their alertness. He had seen photographs of the Swiss Guard, and even in his reality their ceremonial role was only a small part of their purpose. He imagined that here they must be a full fighting force. He turned his gaze away from these people as well. Their casualness disturbed him.

Holly would have hated this place, with its bastardisation of all she thought of as pure and precious, and Jonah craved to discover what could have gone so wrong. Despite his lack of belief, even he could see that these devout souls had betrayed their philosophy and made themselves godless. Did they really think that they were performing God’s work? And how had this world’s beliefs become so twisted? One of their holiest places had been turned into a factory of death, and they continued praying at the site of their greatest blasphemy. He was sad that he would never know the truth and, even if he did, that it would soon die with him. He might have been part of one of the most ambitious experiments in history – Coldbrook, and its brave, doomed journey – but some things would always remain a mystery to him.

Perhaps, as with people, there were some realities where evil was endemic.

The stone paving beneath Jonah’s feet had been smoothed and grooved by the passage of countless feet, and he wondered just how long this had been going on.

A flurry of movement further along the next line caught his attention. A tall middle-aged woman stepped aside from her Inquisitor and spun around, kicking out at its head. She missed, though the Inquisitor had not appeared to move. And in the blink of an eye she was gone. The seemingly relaxed guards sprang into action, grabbed her arms and legs, and dragged her away. She started shouting,
but one of them thrust something into her mouth. Blood splashed.
Cut out her tongue
, Jonah thought, and he, like all the others, turned away.

He rolled the ball in his mouth, the trigger that held the key to this twisted place’s doom.

For all of you
, he thought.

Jonah would be dead within minutes. And his solitary regret was that he would not stay down.

Holly had told Drake that she needed to be alone. She knew that he hadn’t believed her, but he’d given her the time. So she’d retreated to her small room, closed the door, sat on the bed, and for a while she’d dreamed that everything was as it had been.

Inaction made her twitchy, so she plugged in the laptop on her small desk and flipped it open, and three minutes later she was patched into the Coldbrook security camera network. She scanned the facility for a minute or two, avoiding what she really needed to see.

‘Please God that it’s not as bad as I think,’ she said. The first three cameras were out, their systems blown, and she gasped as the image from the fourth surface camera appeared.

There were hundreds of zombies in the compound above. Perhaps even thousands. The image was silent,
but Holly could see that most of them were motionless mannequins standing or sitting, facing in random directions. Now and then their mouths would change shape as they made their hooting call. Some were burnt, mutilated, darkened with dried blood, and others looked almost untouched. Both extremes were horrific in their different ways. She pressed the key to swivel the camera, and it swept the compound from left to right. Fires still burned in the destroyed trucks close to the entrance, and she froze the camera on the school bus backed against the ventilation duct. The vehicle was packed full of furies, and the duct housing was almost buried beneath bodies. The image moved, shimmered and shivered. She imagined them packing the duct itself, scores of zombies piled in there so that those at the bottom were crushed beneath their weight.

Crushed, and yet still animated. She had heard them in the garage.

Holly started to shake. This could not last. Safety here was a fleeting thing, pressured to failing point just like those monsters in the ventilation shaft. Coldbrook had been built with designed-in fail-safes, some of which Jonah had triggered and one of which Vic had bypassed.

It was time to prepare her own measures.

Holly had seen these bodies before. At least she knew for certain that they were dead, though she was still unsettled
as she edged past them, stepping over an outstretched arm. The repair she’d made days before was holding well, but she bypassed it and mounted a small vertical ladder set into the core housing. She shone her torch down into the space beneath her – the space surrounding the core – and even after everything she had seen the science of this place still gave her the shivers.

In the depths of Coldbrook, the core was rooted into the mountain itself.

Holly descended the ladder, and when she almost slipped and fell she held on tight, wondering what a pointless death down here would change, how many lives it might put in jeopardy or destroy. Coldbrook had always been an amazing place, which was why she’d always loved working here, with people who saw the awesome potential and importance in what they did. And now they were
all
important.

As she went deeper, so the pressure of the core impressed itself upon her. She could not feel or hear it, yet it sang in her bones. It was only when she reached the narrow platform at the deepest part of Coldbrook that she realised why that sensation was familiar – it was the same as passing through the breach.

Perhaps the multiverse was laughing at her.

Holly had no time to rest. She opened her tool pouch, flicked the torch’s beam across the mess of control panels and boards, and found what she had come looking for.
Even here, she felt realities hinging on one act or object. If this screw failed, realities might change. If this capacitor was faulty, stars might crumble.

She got to work.

An hour later, after Holly had showered, she stood inside the doorway to the garage area, listening again to the sound from behind the plant-room wall. If she didn’t know what was in there, she might have imagined a thousand doves cooing softly in the darkness. The Hummer was still parked tight against the door. There were two people from Gaia standing watch with Hitch and another Unseen, chatting quietly, their fascination obvious.

‘We’re cool,’ Hitch said when he saw her watching. ‘No movement from there, just that fucking awful noise. We need some Springsteen in here, drown it out.’

‘Springsteen?’ one of Drake’s people said.

Hitch’s face fell. ‘Dude.’

Holly left the garage knowing that they could never be safe, and that it would take more than walls to separate them from the chaos that had smothered her world.

But she felt happier now, because she had a secret.

Vic snapped awake at the screeching alarm, and déjà vu screamed in with it.

Olivia sat on the bed wide-eyed, her arms hugging her knees. Lucy sat up, face grim, hair awry.

‘Oh, shit,’ Vic muttered, standing, tripping over his discarded boots, sitting to slip them on again, and all the while his family did not speak. The alarm thrummed into them, that awful repeating tone that could mean nothing good.

His satphone rang. ‘Yeah.’

‘Vic, they broke in,’ Holly said. ‘The garage, the plant-room wall, it was just blockwork, and it cracked under pressure. Weakened by the Hummer impact, maybe. I was there an hour ago and it was all fine, but . . . Hundreds of them. I’m in Secondary, I can see them on the camera. Being held back in the common room right now. But I can’t reach Sean, he’s in Jonah’s room, you need to get there and—’