Tim Lebbon: Coldbrook

Tommy had spoken to Jayne as Sean had dragged her through the breach, reminding her of the years they had been together, good times and bad. She’d laughed and cried with him, raged at him and made love with him, and most of those memories had not involved her churu. Coming through at last, she had been sad to leave Tommy behind, but in a way she never would. He had saved her life and whatever she did from now on was testimony to that.

‘Want me to carry you?’ Sean asked.

‘Want me to carry you , old man?’

‘I’m fifty-two!’

‘Yeah? And?’

‘I’m not old.’

‘Look old to me. Bit of a beer gut there. Greying hair, thinning on top.’

‘I am not!’

‘Quiet!’ Moira was a few steps ahead, and she’d turned to scold them. They’d all been warned to walk in silence, and the children seemed to be doing it better than those adults who’d come through. Perhaps it was a game to the kids, but Jayne wasn’t sure. Maybe for those so young, survival and adaptability to change were instinctive.

They walked slowly, mostly as a concession to Jayne. The people from Gaia looked at her with a combination of awe and fear, and she wasn’t certain she’d ever get used to that. Sean had already stopped trying to persuade her to take Drake’s cure. When Marc is done , she’d said. He’s the main man now . They both knew to expect hard times.

As they topped the first rise and she could see further, a wave of pain washed over her. She gasped, and Sean held her arm.

‘Will you look at that,’ he said softly.

Jayne sighed away her pain, and saw another world that she might call home.

The lines snaked through the Basilica ahead of him and Jonah had finally seen the truth. The Inquisitors and their masters feigned ceremony, ascribing great weight to their pronouncements and speaking with deep solemnity. But this was little more than a processing plant.

As they entered the building, naked people were taken in front of the Holy Fathers and given their blessings. Past them in the darker corners of the building were the operating tables. Cries of pain echoed from the high stone ceilings, and the stench of blood filled the air. Between cries, accompaning the shuffling of feet, Jonah was sure he could hear the liquid gurgle of blood running through drains and into gutters.

Beyond the operating tables a ramp sloped up towards the exits at the rear. Here stumbled the new, naked, blood-streaked Inquisitors he had seen leaving the building perhaps an hour before.

He would never reach the operating tables. He would die unchanged.

Shuffling forward with the others, Jonah prepared himself for what was to come. He was old and had done so much, and yet there would be that instant when he had to bite. The moment between life and death.

It’s for everyone , he thought. Everything I know, and the infinities I don’t . He was witness to genocide on a universal scale, and he carried the means to end it. Perhaps. It made him sad that he would never know whether or not it had worked.

He thought of Wendy, his beautiful wife, and wondered what she would think of him now. And though Jonah was not a spiritual man, he felt closer to her at this moment than he ever had since her death. He had no expectation of seeing her again when he died, no belief that she existed now anywhere other than in his heart. But he held on to the idea that they were still together in memory. Death would make memories of them both.The queue moved on, and he drew closer to the Holy Fathers. Members of the Swiss Guard stood in greater numbers here. Each line passed in front of one of the old men, and the people only paused for a few moments before being urged on. He could make out some of what the bishops were saying now, could hear their utter conviction, the strain of repetition, and their weariness.

Jonah realised that these were people . The knowledge struck him hard, and for the first time since entering the old breach on Gaia the heat of tears threatened. The zombies gave the tragedy a monstrous face and even the Inquisitor projected the sense of a monstrous automaton, a victim indoctrinated and brainwashed, dehumanised. Here, on this Earth dedicated to killing every other, he saw at last that this was a very human tragedy.

Jonah drew closer, and closer. The old man blessing his line was short and thin, delicate spectacles perched on the end of his long nose, flowing red robes sprawled around him like a blood slick. The robes were grubby where people had walked on them, and white sweat stains marked uneven patterns beneath his arms and around his neck. Halfway through a blessing he yawned and glanced at a watch on his wrist. His shift is ending , Jonah thought, and fury rose through the sadness, fresh and empowering.

‘Nice,’ Jonah muttered.

As the naked woman ahead of him was guided in front of the old man by her Inquisitor, Jonah manoeuvred the small sphere between his teeth and crunched it.

Set against his heart, the seed planted by Drake burst.

Jonah closed his eyes, but there was no pain. Whatever Drake had given him had been designed to mask reaction, and even then he wondered at the science of this thing. He felt warmth spreading through his chest, followed by an icy coolness, a numbness, and a distancing from his body.

His Inquisitor held his arm and steered him towards the Holy Father.

‘The Word has found your world, and spoken its end.’ The old man’s voice was flat and monotonous. ‘Welcome, heathen, to the true Church.’

Jonah looked down at the little man, and smiled.

‘I hereby cast out your sins of errant belief and bless you into God’s only world, and entrust you to perform God’s holy work.’

No more sin , Jonah thought, and his grin grew wider. He was moving away. His vision blurred, and when he blinked he saw his wife. She held out her hand and he almost laughed, because she was as he had always remembered her.

‘That way,’ the man said, nodding to his left. He drew a cross in the air in front of Jonah’s face, then glanced down at his chest.

‘God doesn’t know you,’ Jonah rasped. His senses faded to darkness, and all awareness of his body withered. His mind clung on for a moment longer, and his final thought was of Wendy walking away from him, and himself holding her hand as he accompanied her, two lost memories.

‘What’s that?’ the bishop said. ‘Blood, there, on his chest!’

Jonah’s mouth flooded with foul heat. He flitted away to blissful nothingness, fell forward, and bit.