Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  There was flesh between Uri’s teeth, and a clot of blood and blonde hair was stuck to his chin.

  “No, we should talk, you need to sit down and—” Jonah stammered.

  Uri’s face changed as his mouth fell open, lips and cheeks wrinkling into a silent growl, and it was the silence that threw Jonah. On the viewing screens he had seen carnage and shooting and blood, and he had played his own imaginary soundtrack to those sights. He had been wrong. These things were not ravenous slavering animals, not growling roaring things, but something else entirely.

  He lifted the gun quickly, its barrel striking Uri’s chin, causing is head to flip up, Jonah tucked in his elbow and raised the gun higher—it was only inches from his own face when he fired. The explosion was deafening. His hearing faded instantly, driving all his senses inward for what seemed like minutes but must have been only seconds. When he opened his eyes again there was dust drifting from the ceiling and Uri was slumped against the open door, slowly sliding down to the floor, his head a ruin. And the woman was coming for Jonah again, her mutilated face stretching horribly as her jaw seemed to unhinge, teeth glaring in the wet red mask. The shot’s recoil had jarred Jonah’s shoulder, but he brought the gun up again and held it in a two-handed grip at arm’s length this time, closing his eyes as the woman’s forehead struck the barrel. He pulled the trigger, then squinted through the smoke at her thrashing on the floor. He shot her again and again. The gunshots sounded distant, though the recoil forced him against the desk. His ears started ringing as his hearing returned, though beyond the ringing there was only silence and his own panting and groaning, and the gasps as he tried to spit gun smoke from his mouth.

  The woman was motionless. Her head was shattered, spilling out a mess of gore. Blood seeped, and Jonah gagged, but he had to look again. It did not gush. No working heart to pump it, he thought. Uri was slumped against the open door, chin on his chest, displaying the exit wound on the back of his head just above the neck. Blood and brain matter ran down beneath his collar, but again there was no excessive bleeding.

  I shot two people, Jonah thought, but he found himself feeling surprisingly calm. Although his ears were still ringing the stillness seemed a comfort to him. I gave them peace. I helped them. He nodded as he knelt, holding on to that thought. The woman’s leg was stretched out and her shoe hung off. He touched the top arch of her foot, blew on his hand and touched her skin again. She was cooler than she should have been, her skin paler. She was someone from the kitchen. He had eaten food that she had cooked, and had thanked her for it. Now she was dead.

  “Bloody hell.”

  He moved backwards until the desk stopped his progress again. He stared, chilled by the bodies’ presence. But he had opened the door for a reason. He had to move on. There would be dangers, and part of his scheme relied on pure luck. But it meant taking action. Standing here returning cold dead stares was not meaningful activity.

  Jonah dragged the corpses outside, wanting to keep Secondary clear. As he grabbed the laptop and closed and locked the door, he did not take his eyes from the two motionless cadavers. And even as he turned a corner to reach the staircase, he kept glancing back. Though they did not follow him, he knew they would pursue him in his dreams.

  He descended the staircase, stepping past the nightgown-wearing woman and almost slipping on the mess that her shattered skull had spilled down the stairs. Heart thudding, he closed the staircase door, gasped, and paused, raising the gun again as a shadow moved away in front of him. It slipped down a side corridor into one of the accommodation wings, seeming to flow rather than walk. An overhead light flickered and a shadow danced again. Perhaps that was all he had seen. Turning the corner quickly he saw nothing but empty corridor, and he hurried on.

  Jonah used the laptop to open and close doors remotely, flipping to the other program so that he could use the CCTV cameras to see around the bends in corridors and check his route. He passed the offices and entered the canteen and common room, where pool tables and loungers were scattered around the large room. He’d sat in here often, drinking bad blended whisky from the small bar run by Andy. Jonah had seen the barman die. Andy would laugh and chat with those who spent most of their time in the facility itself—often Vic had been down here as well, even though he had his wife and child topside. For a while he had remained down here a whole lot more, and Jonah was well aware of the intense relationship he’d had with Holly.

  The common room had been a place of laughter, but now a monster sat in one of its chairs. Sergey Vasilyev was a particle physicist, seconded to Coldbrook to share in their work and to contribute what he’d learned from research he had been undertaking in Saint Petersburg for the past eighteen years. Russia’s own version of Coldbrook had been mothballed due to the massive financial investment required, and Sergey had been invited to represent Russia at the Stateside complex. Some of Coldbrook’s backers had been uncomfortable with the Russian’s presence but Jonah had been adamant—as far as he was concerned, there were no secrets or borders when it came to science, and Sergey was the best in his field.

  Now he sat in one of the leather loungers, watching Jonah with lazy eyes as the older man circled the room’s perimeter.

  “Sergey?” Jonah asked, though he knew it was useless. It looked as if the tall Russian had taken a sustained burst of gunfire to his stomach and pelvis, and his legs hung at unnatural angles. He lifted one hand, as if to reach across the twenty-foot gap between them. His face was slack, his expression inhuman.

  Jonah lifted the gun, then lowered it again. As he left the room he heard a low, sustained moan, and remembered the sound from the first time Sergey had tried proper whisky.

  Just leaving a problem until later, he thought, but he could not bring himself to shoot the seated man.

  Nerves tingling, limbs shaking even as he walked, Jonah made it to the short corridor leading to Coldbrook’s garage. He closed the door, saw no lock, and checked the systems on his laptop. There was no facility to lock this door automatically. Why? Why the hell enable corridor doors to be locked, but not the door to the garage? He almost shouted in frustration, but instead knelt with his back against the door and accessed the CCTV programme.

  Perhaps the afflicted really couldn’t open doors. The two outside Secondary had been scratching at the door, not clinging to its handle. But maybe they’d known it was locked, and the scratching had been a sign of their frustration.

  Breathing heavily, Jonah viewed the garage through its three cameras. One of them did not react to prompts, but the other two swivelled to order, giving him a panning view of the whole area. He saw himself hunkered down by the door, an old man hiding in fear. The three vehicles seemed untouched, and he saw no shadows that should not be there. Behind the parked vehicles to his left was the access door to the air-conditioning plant room. It was open. He flipped the laptop windows again to the security program but this door also was manual only.

  “Damn it!” he whispered. At the sound of his own voice, he felt tears welling up and his throat constricting, and as he tried to stand his legs gave way and he slid down the closed door until he was sitting again on the cold floor. The shakes came harder than before, and his vision blurred. His joints ached. He wiped his eyes angrily but more tears came, and he tried to remember the last time he’d cried. He sometimes woke from dreams with tears in his eyes, but he had not cried while awake for some time. “But I’ve never shot anyone before,” he whispered, and his voice shook. He laughed softly and let the tears come, because there was nothing else he could do.

  Jonah cried for a couple of minutes, not caring, what the tears were for. If he wept for those he had seen die, then they deserved this meagre tribute. And if he shed tears over those he had shot, then perhaps that might purge some guilt.

  But even as his weeping ceased and he managed to calm his shivers, with every blink of his eyes he saw scenes of devastation that were sensations rather than images, intimations of chaos and death that filled him with a
sense of deep, primeval dread. And as he rested his head back against the door and tried to resolve what to do next, the handle above him started to move down, then up again.

  He stood and ran, legs shaking beneath him, his heart protesting with stutters and missed beats. The laptop almost slipped from his hand and he grabbed it just in time, pressing it against his chest. If he had a choice of what to drop it would be the gun, not the laptop. Battery won’t last for ever, he thought, but he was not thinking about for ever, or even the next few hours. This was minute-by-minute stuff.

  The handle snapped down with a different sound as the catch clicked open. The door behind him banged open just as he reached the Hummer’s driver-side door. Regulations said that keys were to be kept in the vehicles, but they also said that cameras should be regularly serviced and that communication routes to the surface should be maintained at all times. Rick Summerfield had not heard any alarm, and the third camera in the garage did not react to prompts. Someone’s head’s gonna roll! Jonah thought as he stepped up and pulled the door open.

  The keys were in the ignition, a Darth Vader key-fob hanging below. He climbed in, slid the laptop across the front seats and slammed the door behind him.

  Something hard struck the vehicle on the other side.

  Jonah jumped and stared into Sergey’s face. The physicist’s eyes were wide and staring, his lips drawn back in a grimace. He must have dragged himself through the garage door after Jonah, lifting himself on the door handle and thereby opening it, and climbed onto the Hummer’s step. Now he held on to the passenger-side door handle and tugged. Spittle flecked the glass, Sergey’s hair shook and tangled, and behind him Jonah saw a shape darting through the open door. This second shape joined Sergey on the step, scratching at the glass with long, delicately painted fingernails. Jonah did not even look at her face before starting the Hummer.

  The engine roared to life, startling Jonah but causing no let-up in his attackers’ efforts to open the door. They’re fast. And they can open doors, even if it’s only by accident. Remember that. He shoved the big vehicle into gear and then swung it around to the left, clipping one of the SUVs and tearing off its bumper. It was a long time since he’d driven anything. He stamped hard on the brakes, bracing himself against the steering wheel as the dead woman disappeared below the Hummer’s door frame. Sergey hung on, tugging, tugging, his teeth still bared. His actions spoke of a need beyond understanding, but his eyes were dead windows onto the void.

  Jonah backed up slowly, using both wing mirrors to judge his approach, trying to ignore the raving thing shifting back and forth to his left. He felt the gentle knock of the plant-room door being shoved closed, and even though it was moving slowly the final impact of the heavy vehicle against the wall jarred him in his seat. He revved some more, lifting the clutch but sensing no more backward movement. It was done. Whatever had passed through that way was not coming back, and nothing else could enter.

  The woman jumped up at the passenger-side window, scratching at the glass rather than tugging at the handle. Jonah looked down into his lap, twisting his hands and remembering the time almost fifty years before when Wendy had slipped the ring onto his finger. Then he turned in his seat, held the gun in both hands and shot the woman through the window. She flipped back out of sight and he scooted over the seats, looking down to make sure he’d fired straight.

  She slammed into the window again, glass starring and then tumbling into the cab in a hundred diamond shards.

  Jonah kicked himself back, aimed again, and shot her in the face. This time she didn’t get up. He edged over and looked. She lay on the concrete floor, arms flung back, dead eyes staring at the ceiling, a neat hole in her forehead.

  “Good shot,” Jonah said, and his immediate future was suddenly, awfully clear. There was the laptop, through which he could scout his path through the facility, remote-locking doors to secure certain sections. There was the gun in his hand, spare loaded magazines in his pocket. And there were the zombies.

  He might be here for days, or weeks. He might be here for ever.

  Turning in his seat and telling himself the thing at the driver’s window was no longer Sergey Vasilyev, Jonah lifted the gun once more.

  5

  “Just what the fuck have you freaky fucks gone an’ done down there?” Sheriff Scott Blanks asked. He was a big man, carrying a little extra weight but burly enough to get away with it. He was also quietly spoken, but Vic could feel the anger radiating from him. And fear. It was good that he was afraid; that was one less thing Vic had to do.

  “I’m just relaying what Professor Jones told me,” Vic said.

  “And how come you’re not still down there?”

  “I was home with my family,” Vic lied. “Got the call. He says that…” He shook his head, because it still sounded too outlandish.

  “What, son?” Blanks was maybe a couple of years older than Vic, but it still seemed entirely acceptable that he should call him “son”. That was the kind of man he was.

  “Sheriff, can we talk in private?” They were in the police station reception area and three other people were listening to their conversation, two cops and a desk clerk.

  “We are in private,” the sheriff said.

  Okay, Vic thought. Olivia and Lucy are waiting, I need to be as quick as possible, and… And the only road leading away from Coldbrook came here. However damaged those infected were—whatever they had become—he thought it likely that they would follow the path of least resistance.

  “There’s been an accident. There’s an infection, and it makes people… mad. Murderous. Jonah Jones says that lots are dead down there, and some of the killers may have escaped.”

  “Killers?”

  “And they may be coming for Danton Rock. So be ready. And Jonah says to shoot them in the head to stop them.” Vic winced against the mockery he expected, but Sheriff Blanks only raised his eyebrows.

  “The head?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “What we got here, zombies?” the woman cop said, chuckling softly. She was short and squat, pretty face, and she’d once let Vic off a parking ticket. The other cop was smiling, but moving nervously from foot to foot. He must have been ten years younger than Vic, and the flicker of uncertainty lit his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Vic said, taking a chance, because he really needed to get away. Silence descended for a few long seconds.

  “Just what the fuck have you guys gone an’ done down there?” Sheriff Blanks asked again.

  “I’ve heard talk about what they done,” the young cop said. “Blasting holes into other places, that’s what. Letting stuff out. Just like in The Mist.”

  “There’s no mist,” Vic said, unsure of what he meant.

  “Fiddling with stuff you shouldn’t?” the woman said. Vic bet she wished she’d given him that ticket now. She’d laughed at the idea of zombies, but she knew there was something very wrong. She was that perceptive, at least. No one could look as shocked as Vic, nor act that edgy, without something being wrong.

  “You leavin’ town?” the sheriff asked.

  “Yeah,” Vic said, nodding. “Had a trip planned for a couple of days, and—”

  “Don’t bullshit me, son. You’re running.”

  Vic did not reply, and silence descended again, broken only by the creak of the young male cop’s shoes as he shifted left, right, left.

  “Okay,” the sheriff said eventually. “Okay.” And Vic heard the decision in his voice. He listened, he heard, and now I can go.

  “Might only be one or two of them,” Vic said.

  “We’ll need a statement,” the woman cop said, and then the phone rang and she snatched it up. “Sheriff’s office.” She was silent for a while, her eyes flicking from Blanks to Vic, back again. “Okay, keep the doors locked, get upstairs, we’ll be right there. Got a firearm? Okay. Okay.” She hung up.

  “What?” the sheriff asked.

  “Pete Crowther, the farmer. Says two men and a
woman’re trying to break into his house. Says one of them’s had an arm torn off, and the woman looks like she’s bin run down.” Her pretty face had paled, and she kept glancing at Vic as she talked. “Says they’re like animals, but quiet. “Part from the hootin’.”

  “Hooting?”

  Vic backed towards the door, the sheriff staring at him, and when he felt the cold wood at his back the policewoman came for him, still afraid but with a purpose in mind. She had one arm behind her back, reaching for her handcuffs.

  “Let the fucker run,” Blanks said, and he stormed through a door behind the desk.

  Vic turned and pushed his way out, feeling the policewoman’s stare on his back. When he emerged onto the sunlit front steps, Lucy was leaning from the passenger window of the RAV4, Olivia’s small face pressed against the back window.

  “What?” Lucy asked immediately.

  “Nothing.” Vic ran down the steps and around the front of the vehicle, and as he was opening the driver’s door he heard the roar of a motor. He climbed into the car and slammed his door, hitting the central locking button in case the sheriff changed his mind. If he does, it’s pedal down—the idea of fleeing the law was somehow more unsettling than anything. It was an indicator of how much had changed so quickly. Three hours ago I was asleep, he thought, and his dead sister’s face loomed at him again.

  “I love you,” he said, turning to his wife.

  She caught her breath, surprised. Her eyes watered. Vic leaned across to kiss her and, though she barely responded, she didn’t pull away.

  “Mommy and Daddy, loving it up!” Lucy called, and Olivia’s laughter was the greatest gift Vic could have asked for right then.

  A police cruiser emerged from beside the station and stopped directly in front of the RAV4. The sheriff sat in the driver’s seat, the policewoman beside him, and he stared at Vic as he spoke into the car’s radio. As he pulled away and powered off down the street, Lucy asked, “What was that all about?”