Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  The man and woman working on the engine have pulled pistols from their belts. They dash to where three children cower beside the bus, and whisper words of love to each of them before shooting them in the head. Then they hug each other, and Jonah hears them counting, un, deux, trois, before—

  —the boat is drifting along the canal, seven people sitting around its cockpit looking shocked and afraid. They are all wet. The vessel seems to be driving itself, and when Jonah looks back he sees the elegant movement of a mechanical flipper shoving at the churned water, giving the craft speed.

  Behind the boat and back along the canal, Jonah can see a slick of burning oil reaching from bank to bank. There are shapes writhing in the fire and others emerging from it, swimming under their own power until they sink and the flames on their heads are extinguished with a hiss.

  In the boat, a small child slips to the deck and falls still. Her mother attends to her, while the others watch, exhausted.

  They are wretched and without hope. Again, the voice is not Jonah’s, and it feels like a solid strange weight inside his skull.

  The mother breathes a sigh of relief. Her daughter sits up. Jonah wants to shout, because he sees nothing in the little girl’s eyes, but he is just as silent here as he was before. The girl’s mouth falls open, and—

  There are maybe fifty people running across the desert of black ice. Grim-faced men and hard-faced women are arranged around the outside of the group, while at its centre are a dozen children and several very old people. They wear heavy animal pelts, and the adults and a few of the kids carry an incredible amount of equipment on their backs. The old people and very young children carry only their own clothes. Their breath plumes around them, but running keeps them warm, and their pace seems to be steady and comfortable. It takes a moment for Jonah to realise that he is running with them.

  They delay the inevitable… That stranger’s voice, rasping and heavy.

  A mile behind them there is a wall of people. They also run, but there is no breath pluming around them, and they carry nothing. Many are naked and pale. Their pursuit creates a distant thunder of thousands of pounding feet, and a humming on the air.

  There is no wasted talk within the small group, and also no apparent destination ahead of them. Jonah feels a spike of desperation, but there is a confidence among the people that he cannot deny. They know where they’re going, he thinks, and then a tall old man stumbles and cries out.

  For a moment the group slows, but then one of the women shouts and they run on. She stays behind with the old man, and Jonah, unseen, remains with them.

  The man says something to the woman, and even though Jonah cannot understand the words he knows they are soft and loving. She smiles, then reaches behind her shoulder and whips something through the air. As the man’s head tilts away from his neck on a fountain of blood, Jonah tries to open his mouth in a silent scream, and—

  * * *

  The shrill ringing of the satphone smothered the sound of thundering feet, and Jonah snapped awake. He’d nodded off while leaning back in a chair, his legs crossed and feet propped on the control desk, and the first thing he saw was the creature sitting on his legs. Silhouetted against the screen display of the breach chamber, it presented the same silhouette as before: spiky scalp, protruding mouth. Its hand was extended, fingers clasped around a blood-red object which waved tendrils like those of a sea anemone.

  Those ideas that all struggle is hopeless, those are its thoughts.

  Still swathed in the residue of sleep Jonah asked, “Just what the bastard hell are you?”

  The shape shifted slightly, and Jonah saw the stains of tattoos across its forearms, old ink smudged by time beneath pale skin. It turned on his outstretched legs to face the other way, and its robe fell open to offer a candid, grotesque view of its genitals. It was a long time since Jonah had seen another man naked, and it added to the shocking surrealism of the moment.

  The thing—the man—turned his head towards the viewing screen. Jonah glanced that way, saw the view of Accommodation with the three closed doors, and then he felt the subtle weight lift from his legs. He closed his eyes briefly before looking again.

  The strange man had gone. Left him alone. So alone, and the only thing he craved now was company. Jonah looked around Secondary, finding it hard to catch his breath as he tried to comfort himself with the idea that it was a dream. But he could still feel the cold wet kiss of those tendrils against his scalp.

  He snapped up the satphone as it trilled again, but when he answered the caller had signed off. Marc Dubois, the screen said, but Marc could wait because he was only a voice. Jonah looked at the screen again—those closed doors, hiding things he might want to see, or not—and then ran a check of the route between Secondary and the relevant accommodation wing. No walking things, no shadows. It seemed clear.

  Panting, he checked the pistol and stood by the door, staring through the small viewing pane at the silent corridor beyond. He’d dragged the two bodies from out there and locked them in a store cupboard but there were still splashes of brain and dried blood on the floor and walls.

  He ignored the mess and ran.

  2

  I wonder if they feel any different, Jayne thought. When they change. When they rage. I wonder if they know they’ve changed. She glanced at the sleeve of her jacket, beneath which was the bandage, and beneath that the bite, and knew that she had not transformed.

  Jayne was a frequent student of death. There had been her brother’s murder, and her mother’s own living demise contained within the murky depths of bottles of cheap wine. And the churu had driven Jayne to consider suicide many times, whether in idle speculation on a cold winter’s afternoon when Tommy was out working, or a more serious analysis of the route she could take, and the implications, during those less frequent moments of real despair. Mostly she cast those thoughts aside with a shake of the head, and then went to find something that made her life worth living—the books she enjoyed reading, the food she was adept at cooking, Tommy’s unconditional love.

  But she often considered what death meant, and she was sad at the thought of everything she was being so easily wiped away.

  Now there were these things that seemed to be beyond death. And that changed everything.

  Her arm throbbed as she steered the old Toyota into a parking space. The wound had stopped bleeding, but she could still feel the sharp imprints of that woman’s teeth, their points piercing her skin and digging down into the meat of her. If Jayne hadn’t been lucky, the woman’s teeth would have pressed together, scraping across bone and ripping away a chunk of her arm. And what germs do I have? she wondered. What infection did she plant in me, and is it still in me now? She switched off the car’s engine, sat motionless for a while, and decided that thinking about it too much would be the end of her.

  She’d been bitten and had survived. Now she must accept it and move on.

  The drive through the dark night had been terrifying, and surreal. At one intersection Jayne had seen three cars crashed together and burning, a group of people on the sidewalk shouting and arguing about whose fault it had been. Turning a corner, heading out of town, she’d passed a long straight row of bars and restaurants, and a crowd had spilled onto the streets, bottles and glasses clasped in their hands, singing, living it up. Tommy’s dead! she’d wanted to shout, but she didn’t think they’d have cared. Perhaps many of them didn’t yet know about the strange attacks and the even stranger consequences, but she suspected that the ones partying hardest did know.

  She’d dreaded getting caught in traffic approaching the airport, but there was only a slight hold-up. She’d wondered at that. Had people really not grasped what was happening? But then, she had witnessed things first-hand. Had seen people bitten and shot, run over and killed, only to stand up again and come at her with those empty, animal eyes. Eyes that held the depth of true death. So she supposed that news reports—garbled, confused, and unbelievable as they were—would do littl
e to portray the unbearable truth.

  Jayne left the car and locked it, knowing she would never sit in it again. It had been Tommy’s secret pride and joy, an old model that had far fewer electrics to go wrong, and which had gone around the clock already. They could have afforded a newer car, but he liked its styling, its look, and he’d said why dump what’s not broken? She liked that about Tommy. He never really considered material things to be of any real importance.

  A passenger jet roared behind the buildings as it powered along the runway for take-off. At least they were still flying. She’d been worried about that. If this had been an outbreak of Ebola or bubonic plague they’d have shut the airports, seaports and state borders. But apparently it would take a lot longer for the authorities to take action over a zombie outbreak.

  Jayne gave a bark of laughter that turned into a cry, and then she walked to the airport building.

  The departures terminal was busy. There were businessmen reading newspapers or frowning over their BlackBerries, families huddled together with kids excited and worried adults glancing around, and single travellers, many of whom Jayne could not read. She found herself checking them all for injuries, but all she saw was one man with a fleck of blood on his white collar. Shaving cut, she thought, and she had to bite her lip to hold back the hysteria.

  The next flight to the UK was in three hours, and she bought one of the last places on it. She used her disabled card to get a comfortable seat, then used it again to be fast-tracked through to the departures lounge. And the whole experience was dreamlike. There were a couple of people crying, and a few who were huddling around the TV in one of the bars, but generally people seemed either unsure of what was happening or appeared not to care.

  Jayne spent a few minutes watching the TV, nursing a Jack Daniel’s, more because it had been Tommy’s favourite drink than because she actually wanted it, and she realised then why everything seemed so unreal. Part of it was the fragmentary nature of the reports—there were clips of distant fires, unfocused telephone-camera imagery of shapes rushing through darkness, and helicopter shots of people moving across hillsides. And part of it was the bizarre nature of what they were seeing. Most of the news broadcasts were confused and unclear: unscripted stories, rushed interviews with traumatised and hysterical members of the public, and a few straight-faced officials denying that the emergency services weren’t coping, and assuring viewers that all calls would be dealt with “within two minutes”.

  But scattered among the confused live broadcasts was more telling footage. One brief clip, expertly and probably secretly shot, showed corpses being unloaded from the back of an ambulance. There were so many that they must have been stacked in layers inside, and when Jayne saw the paramedics’ face masks she gave another harsh laugh, followed by a sob. But no one looked her way. All gazes in the bar were focused on the screen at that point, as the cameraman panned along the row of corpses. Terrible wounds were revealed, injuries that belonged in a war. And every one of the bodies had head trauma.

  “At least someone knows what they’re doing,” Jayne said, and two young guys on the table next to her glanced her way with shock written all over their faces. She finished her Jack Daniel’s and closed her eyes, feeling the burn.

  Human nature meant that it would take a while for all this to sink in.

  But it wouldn’t take that long.

  Jayne spent two hours in the departures lounge willing the minutes until take-off away, because once they closed the airport that would be it. She’d be stuck here while they—the famous They, the faceless They—tried to take control of things, and reality would surround her. Once in the air and heading for the UK, the sense of the unreality of everything that had happened would increase. There, for a while, perhaps she would find respite.

  Her flight was called and she boarded. She was sitting next to a middle-aged businessman whose constant chatter marked him as a nervous flyer. Her monosyllabic responses soon persuaded him to keep his nervousness to himself, and as they went through the pre-flight checks and safety demonstrations Jayne closed her eyes and could almost believe that none of this had happened. But her arm still throbbed, and Tommy stared at her behind her closed eyes, the expression on his face one of surprise as Spartacus’s bullet blew his life away.

  They took off, and in the distance Jayne saw a fire blazing somewhere to the north. Fifteen minutes into the flight, an attendant told someone in the seat in front of Jayne that they were the last flight out of Knoxville. From elsewhere she heard someone whisper, “Morris says they’re bombing Atlanta.”

  3

  They drove through the day, hoping to reach Cincinnati by sunset.

  After Vic had told Lucy why and how it was his fault, she’d surprised him by softening a little. He could not be sure how either of them could guarantee it, but their spoken determination to stay together had inspired a measure of strength in him that had been lacking before. Instinct had driven him up and out of Coldbrook, but Lucy’s love went some way to driving his guilt back down. He had much to make amends for, but she knew why he had done what he’d done. In her eyes he saw that she understood.

  Lucy drove some of the way, but Vic always felt more comfortable driving. And besides, for every mile of their three-hundred-mile journey he was considering roadblocks, state border controls, martial law, public panic, and the rule of chaos. In his pocket he carried his identification card, and in the car door beside his left thigh sat the M1911. If they came across trouble, he wanted to be behind the wheel.

  Lucy had spent the first hour of the journey trying to call friends in Danton Rock on her iPhone. Her first couple of calls were answered, and Vic cringed as he heard her telling those at the other end that they should pack and leave immediately. “Forget the damn school fayre!” she said to one of them and to another she whispered, “Something’s gone wrong down there and you shouldn’t hang around.” But then her third call was cut off unexpectedly, and after that the whole cellphone network seemed to go down. She’d tried a dozen more numbers ten times each, including those of her parents and her brother. It was only as the last call connected and a heavy, loaded silence was the only answer to her desperate pleading that she put the phone down.

  She’s beginning to understand. This is my fault, Vic thought. But Lucy said nothing more, and she did not try to call Danton Rock again. She said she wanted to save her phone’s battery.

  They kept the radio on, turned down low so that Olivia couldn’t hear it. She was happy playing her Nintendo DS, and the chirpy jingles of the Keep a Puppy game provided a surreal theme to the stories they were hearing. As the day wore on and they drew closer to Cincinnati, Lucy moved over in her seat so that she could touch Vic. A hand on his thigh, arm around his shoulders, something that involved physical contact—he took as much comfort from it as she did.

  “You can’t blame yourself,” she told him as they listened to a report about a huge fire in central Knoxville.

  “I can,” he said. Lucy squeezed the back of his neck, and from the back seat Olivia started singing.

  The radio reports grew in severity, until one channel said they were suspending their Sunday music programming to bring all the updates on the developing situation.

  “What’s a zombie?” Olivia asked.

  Lucy flicked the radio off and glanced at Vic.

  “Just a silly monster from the movies,” Vic said.

  “No such things as monsters, honey,” Lucy said.

  They exited the freeway and pulled up outside a rest stop. Olivia whooped and hollered, delighted that they’d reached their holiday destination, and Vic looked at the trucks and motorbikes and dusty cars lining the parking lot, wondering at his child’s sense of imagination. Outside the car, stretching the several-hour journey from their limbs, Lucy stood close to Vic and entwined her fingers with his.

  “They’ll have the TV on in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Olivia will see.”

  He bit his lip
and watched his beautiful daughter skipping beside the car’s hood, singing softly to herself, so vulnerable and dependent.

  “It’s spreading quickly,” he said.

  “Moving as fast as people can run,” Lucy said.

  “Faster.” Vic brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear, and she gave him a strained smile. He’d treasure any smile from his wife now as a gift.

  “Jonah hasn’t called,” she said.

  “He’ll be busy.” Lucy nodded slowly, rubbing an ache in the back of her neck. “Holly Wright went through,” Vic said, not sure why he’d blurted that now. Perhaps she had been on his mind, beneath the fear for his family and what was to come. Perhaps leaving her behind was just another facet of his guilt.

  “Through the breach?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where the thing that started this came from?”

  Vic nodded, unable to answer. He felt a weight behind his eyes, and his heart was thumping fast. Don’t let me see that look in your eyes, he thought, remembering the dream of his sister and Lucy.

  They ate, used the toilet, and left the diner as quickly as possible. As Vic drove, Lucy tried once again to call her parents in Los Angeles and her brother in Seattle. But the networks were still overloaded.

  As she put the phone down once more, they passed by the sign for Cincinnati.

  * * *

  They met Marc Dubois where Jonah had arranged, in a private staff car park at the university. He was sitting on the hood of his car as they pulled up, and Vic saw him checking out their RAV4. In one hand he carried a satphone, in the other he held a cigarette. He did not smile but leaned in Vic’s window, breathing cigarette smoke over him. “One, two, three,” he said, nodding at each of them without expression, and then he turned away and dialled his phone.

  Vic glanced across at Lucy. She raised an eyebrow, then he opened the door and stepped out. His legs and arms were aching, both from the long drive and the escape from Coldbrook that had preceded it. He wished once again that he’d spent more time in that gym.