Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

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.