Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  The boy was screaming, trapped beneath his struggling father and the woman—the thing—biting into him.

  This is not happening, Jayne thought, but she was a new Jayne once again. The Jayne who’d been walking with her love ten minutes ago had changed into the one seeing a car crash, and its results. And now she was Jayne on her own. Because Tommy was dead, and there was no denying that.

  The man’s struggles weakened—the woman had bitten clean though his throat. Jayne could not comprehend the blood. His son—if that was who the boy was—was coated in it, still struggling, and the woman shoved the dying man aside as she reached for the child.

  “No!” Jayne screamed, in denial at what she was seeing as much as against the woman’s obvious intentions. The boy soon stopped screaming.

  The woman looked up. There’s nothing in her eyes, Jayne thought, and she edged back towards the open car door. It was the pain in her joints, the screaming agony in her jarred hips, that gave her the courage to live. It reminded her of her life and everything she had suffered, the trials she went through every day to see another sunrise and eat another meal. And as the woman stood, expressionless and cooing softly, and then came for her, Jayne stood sideways and swung the door wide open. It struck the woman’s thighs and sent her staggering back, giving Jayne time to get inside the car and swing the door closed.

  They’re biting, not eating, she thought.

  She tried to slam the door but the woman stuck her arm in the way. Jayne pulled, tugging as hard as she could, before easing the door back a little to slam it again, and again. She heard the crack of bone, but there was still no sound from the woman. She paused, looked up, and the woman grabbed her hand.

  Jayne screamed for help. No one heard, or if they did they were too concerned with their own personal dramas. The woman heaved, and Jayne’s shoulder burned white-hot with agony as she was lifted towards the space at the top of the open door. There’s a smell, she thought, realising that the woman no longer smelled like a living person. She smelled like old clothes, damp and stale.

  Jayne felt a sick coolness on her forearm, and then hot pain as the woman bit through her skin.

  Unable to breathe, she went limp, and as the woman tried to adjust her grip Jayne fell across the seats and kicked out as hard as she could. The swinging door shoved the woman back against the neighbouring car. Jayne sat up and reached out, slamming the door closed, hitting the locking knob, crying out in victory and pain.

  Her arm was bleeding liberally from the bite. I’ve got it, she thought, and then she saw Spartacus and his young son standing up in front of the car. They looked around, faces slack and eyes empty, paying no regard at all to their wounds or each other. Then they saw her through the windscreen.

  She heard their faint, haunting call.

  The woman who’d bitten her—the woman with a peach ass—pressed her face to the side window, staring in. Her mouth hung open, and her teeth were stained with Jayne’s blood.

  They’ll keep punching until they come through the glass, Jayne thought, but the woman turned and walked away. Spartacus and his son went in different directions, and then they were lost from sight behind the neighbouring cars.

  Jayne screamed. She knew that she should remain silent, stay down and out of sight, but she was a different Jayne now, and she was more afraid than she had ever been before. She could see Tommy’s body in front of the car, but knew that everything had moved on.

  She put her left hand over the bite on her right forearm. The blood was warm and sticky. They’re just biting, passing it on, rabies or something worse. She waited for whatever was to come, wondering if she’d feel the switch between being her and being one of them, and thought about the zombie films that Tommy had liked so much, and the online discussions he’d entered into, arguing the case for running zombies. They’re hunters! he’d tell her, and she’d shake her head and mutter something about him being an overgrown kid.

  Jayne kept her stare fixed on Tommy’s body, ignoring the other movements she saw in her peripheral vision, and plucked her mobile from her jeans pocket. As she tapped in 911, she wondered how the hell she could make whoever answered believe her when she did not yet believe this madness herself.

  Her vision darkened and she felt a familiar faint coming on. Not now not now… But she drifted away, and when she opened her eyes again an unknown length of time had passed. The sky was darker, the mountains above her lit by weakening evening sunlight, and three people were milling around the cars in front of her. All of them were shredded things, though none of the blood looked fresh. She thought they were checking the cars. Her vision swam once more and she rested her arm across her chest, bite on display, as the churu sucked her down again…

  In dreams there were dead fingers massaging her awake, leaving trails of slick, rotting blood across her hips.

  She woke again, jerking upright and crying out as the pain scorched in from her stiff joints. Tears came and blurred her vision, and she wiped her eyes with her arm, forgetting the wound. It was red-raw and still trickling blood, and perhaps that was good. Cleaning the wound, she thought, so that I don’t change and start doing what those things were doing. And then she saw the little girl standing in front of the car.

  Jayne gasped and sat up straighter. It was dusk now, maybe an hour since it had happened. Tommy was a shadow on the ground, and there was no sign of the three wandering people she’d seen before. They must have looked in on me. Maybe one, maybe all three, and did they stand there and stare as I slept?

  The little girl wore her hair in a ponytail.

  “Poor kid,” Jayne whispered, and her illness dragged her down once more into unconsciousness. Her cousin Jill called her across a stretch of water turned red with blood, reaching out but unable to touch. I was coming to see you, she said to Jill, but I stopped and found peace with Tommy, and Jill smiled in understanding and waved her urgently across the water. But I can’t, it’s dirty, I’m clean, and if I step in I might…

  But Jill shook her head. She beckoned to Jayne, and—

  —when she woke up her feet were kicking in the footwell, her arms thrashing at the seat, and she was trying to swim. She shouted out again in pain, crying herself fully awake. Her head thumped with the remnants of unconsciousness.

  Jayne gasped and took several long, deep breaths. No one and nothing moved around her. Tommy was still there, and the little dead girl had gone. Across the car park lay another body, its face turned away from her. Breathing hard, afraid of another blackout, she searched for her mobile phone. When she found it she dialled 911 again.

  Sorry, all our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.

  “What the fuck?” Jayne muttered. She dialled again and got the same message. And again. Then she dialled Ellie’s landline and got her answerphone:

  “Hey, Ellie here, I’ve pissed off to my folks in Kentucky. No way I’m hanging around for this shit.”

  Jayne cancelled the call, shaking her head and terrified of the falling darkness, dialled 911 one more time—and a woman answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m… something’s happened to…” Jayne said, and the tears came. “Tommy.”

  “We’ll have someone with you soon.” And the woman hung up.

  Didn’t even ask my name or where I was. Jayne stared at the phone, expecting the woman to ring back, willing help to come and someone to tell her everything was going to be all right. But the phone remained silent.

  She started the car and eased forward, pausing beside Tommy’s body. Shadows lurked beneath and around the other abandoned vehicles, cast there by the setting sun. Maybe the infected ones were watching with their empty eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Tommy,” Jayne whispered. She tried to remember the last thing she’d heard him say, and the final words she’d said to him.

  As she pulled away from the car park she turned on the radio, and soon she realised why all those operators were busy.

  8

  Jon
ah had to shoot four more of the afflicted in the head. Sometimes he downed them with the first shot, other times it went wide or struck their chest or neck, and he’d have to nerve himself to shoot again. Each time he pulled the trigger he closed his eyes.

  On his laptop he’d worked his way through the facility, opening and closing doors using automatic controls, luring the dead things this way and that until he could lock them away. There were five in the big walk-in fridge in the canteen, three in the services plant room, and two in the gym. The last of the four—those who had surprised him, or who had not gone the way he’d hoped where doors opened or closed—had dashed at him from a bathroom he’d believed to be locked down, and his instinct saved him. He was sure that if he’d had time to think about what was happening, realise what he was doing, then he would have missed. One of them was Ashleigh—she had been an archivist responsible for the storage and duplication of all Coldbrook’s records—and he had shot her in the eye.

  Jonah dragged each body to the accommodation room nearest to where he’d shot them, and locked them inside.

  He’d been keeping a count of each one he’d locked away or put down. He was up to eighteen. With Holly and Vic gone, that left nine people unaccounted for. Some had escaped up the ventilation duct—he knew that for sure—but he had no idea how many. Not nine, he hoped. And yet the fewer that had made it up there, the more remained down here with him.

  No one had emerged at the sounds of gunfire and made themselves known. The hope persisted that some were hiding themselves away, and there were still those three closed doors in an accommodation wing. He had passed them by, and perhaps soon he would think about opening them. Perhaps.

  Because Jonah thought he might have gone insane. What if I’m doing this for real? he’d thought as he stalked corridors and shot down shadows. What if I’ve lost my marbles, and picked up a gun, and tomorrow I’ll be an item on the news, just another gun massacre that would fade into obscurity for all but those affected? Madness had been an intriguing idea, and every time he pulled the trigger and opened his eyes again, he’d look carefully for any change in the zombies’ faces, any glimpse that there was terror hiding behind the facades he had brought into being. But the empty eyes persisted, and when those afflicted were put down the only change was that the eyes no longer moved.

  The change he did notice was purely physical—the brains remained wet. While the blood from their non-cranial wounds soon coagulated, tacky and drying, the mess blown from their skulls was still rich with blood. This made no sense if their hearts stopped, but Jonah supposed that blood might sit in the brain for a while, kept fresh and heavy with infection, and the drive to spread the disease lived with it. The infection killed them, and then took over their brains. Could impulses pass along blood-denuded nerves? He thought not, and yet he could see no other way for them to remain moving.

  He would not let a supernatural explanation even suggest itself to him. He could not. There was a process here, and he had already worked out how to end it. Discovering more was essential.

  Thinking through the science of a zombie actually settled his nerves a little. As he considered venturing to his room to retrieve the remaining Penderyn whisky, Jonah switched on the radio.

  “…found dead beside the road, and a further five bodies were discovered in the camper van. A police source who does not wish to be identified said the bodies were “heavily mutilated about the head”. Elsewhere, a Scout troop is missing in the mountains north-east of Asheville. The Scouts were due home at midday, but with no communication from them since early morning concern is increasing, and parents are demanding a search-and-rescue. And in Bryson City rumours are rife of an army of “shambling ghosts” seen crossing the hillsides towards the township. More on these stories—”

  * * *

  Vic Pearson punched the “off” button and the car fell silent. Olivia snored softly in the back seat, and he wondered when was the last time he’d watched his daughter sleeping and wondered at her dreams. He hoped these were still good ones. Soon, he feared, she would see and know things that might banish childish dreams for ever.

  “Is that all because of what happened?” Lucy asked from the passenger seat. Vic could not look at her, because he feared the accusation in her eyes.

  “It might be.”

  “But have you told anyone? Have you warned them?”

  “I told the sheriff.”

  “But beyond that?”

  The road was long and straight before them, a snake of headlights and lamp posts, and none of them could know what they were leaving behind. He didn’t know, not really. Not yet.

  “Jonah will be onto it,” Vic said.

  “But it’s spreading. Fast. Those shambling ghost things near Bryson City, do you think—”

  “Maybe!” Vic said, harsher than he’d intended. Olivia mumbled something in her sleep, words he would never know.

  “Don’t snap at me, Vic,” Lucy said, intending to castigate him. But her nervous voice betrayed her fear. “Bryson City… that’s twenty miles from Danton Rock, maybe more.”

  Vic had been thinking the same thing. And the Scout troop north-east of Asheville, that was even further away in the opposite direction. He drove on into the night, but when he closed his eyes he saw the darkness of that ventilation duct and smelled the scorched odour of its lockdown.

  “Well, I want to know,” Lucy said softly, and she turned the radio back on.

  I let it all out, Vic thought. He needed to tell her. Everything that’s happening is my fault. I let it escape. But blame was bad enough coming from Jonah, and himself. He was not sure he could bear it from the woman he loved.

  Some bland love song breezed into the car, and Lucy turned the dial in her search for more news.

  “…the Scout troop, and further reports are coming in of isolated violent incidents across the county. On the outskirts of Maryville a church has been found abandoned with blood splashed across its walls and floor. Police are suggesting vandalism, but eyewitnesses say that there are obvious signs of a struggle. Police in Newport have shot dead a man who was attacking and biting people on the streets. Not sure if that reads right, but… And here’s… a new item has just been put in front of me, there’s a… a riot is going on in a suburb of Greenville, South Carolina. There are several fires reported, and the rioting crowd appears to be growing. And reports of… again, biting. This is NCRR Radio, more updates on these stories as they…”

  * * *

  “Nothing about Knoxville yet,” Jayne muttered to herself, turning the radio down. “I might still be okay. I might still make it.” She concentrated on her driving, not too fast, not too slow, not wishing to attract the attention of the law. Her bite was raw and painful, and she had slipped on a denim jacket to cover it up. But she couldn’t risk being pulled over in case they checked and saw, and…

  And what then? She didn’t know. Because those fuckers had been zombies: she’d seen the movies and heard Tommy talking about the books he’d read, and she’d watched that guy taken down by the woman and his baby boy bitten, and then stand again as…

  “As one of them,” she whispered. Tommy had stayed down, unbitten and ignored, because the guy had shot him in the head.

  “Tommy,” she said aloud, and still the tears would not come. The fact of his death was firm with her, she had no doubts, yet it had still not hit home properly. The events surrounding his death still felt like some kind of mad dream, blood-filled and driven by painkillers and too much wine. She’d wake and tell Tommy about her zombie dream, and he’d laugh and massage her back to life as he did every morning, then go and smoke his joint.

  She’d tried 911 four more times as she drove down out of the mountains, only managing to get through once. The guy she’d connected with had taken down the details, waiting patiently as she pulled over and cried as she relayed what had happened up in the car park. Then he’d confirmed that they’d get someone up there “when they could”. He’d signed off without taki
ng her address or contact number.

  Since then she’d driven with the radio on, because word always spread.

  She thought about Ellie, her friend who’d already fled Knoxville ahead of these weird news reports. She had always been easily panicked, and seemed to take the world’s problems on her shoulders. Every week there was another Armageddon that she knew would be the end of her, from Ebola to swine flu, asteroid strikes to global warming, and for someone with such strength of character Jayne was surprised that Ellie could be so afraid.

  “Right to be scared of this shit, Ells,” Jayne said.

  And as she ran through a mental list once again—passport in my desk, couple of hundred bucks stashed in underwear drawer, credit cards, airport a twenty-minute drive from home—she spared a thought for her mother. It was rare that Jayne thought of her at all. She was a ghost in her past, scar tissue on her memory, and she could barely remember her face. That tie had been severed years ago. There were no more, and it was time to finish the journey she’d begun when she had left LA.

  It was dark now, and Tommy was still lying dead in that car park. Mountain animals would be emerging from their hiding places, joining the shadows as they grew from the ground. She should never have left him there at the mercy of carrion creatures.

  Gasping a sudden, shuddering sob, she turned up the radio and scanned it to a talk station.

  “…seven times, and they jus’ tell me ‘please hold on, we’re busy an’ try an’ call back later’, but the guy was standin’ there, starin’ in my window with his throat gone and…”

  “… ask the Lord for help and forgiveness, sinners, because the time has come to count your sins, stack them against the unbreachable wall of His limitless compassion, and if you don’t seize the moment and bow down now the tide of death will sweep over you, and you’ll die without Jesus in your heart…”

  “…they don’t die, and if these psycho Rapture dudes realised that they’d be running like the rest of us. They don’t die. I saw one hit by a truck and dragged two hundred feet under the wheels, and when the trucker got out and went to check, the roadkill reached up and dragged him down and bit him. They bite. That’s what I’ve heard. I’m telling you, they don’t die, and what’re the authorities doing about all this? Just what are they…?”