Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘What sort of place?’

‘Somewhere for times like this.’

Jonah gave him Marc’s contact details, they finished their conversation, and as Vic disconnected he felt a moment of overwhelming shame. While he’d been running, Jonah had been working, doing his best to devise ways in which this horror could be controlled now that it could no longer be contained.

‘So are you going to tell me where we’re going?’ Lucy asked softly.

‘Cincinnati. But first I’ve got to tell you why this is all my fault.’ Vic stared through the windscreen. It had started to rain, and the stream of tail lights looked distorted. His wife held his hand, and he thought of Holly, realising that he had been a student of guilt for quite some time.

‘. . all but abandoned, though rumour has it there were at least thirty mutilated bodies found around the small town. So what happened to the rest of the population of over a thousand inhabitants? Where are they? No one knows. And no one knows why the authorities have labelled reports of “the dead rising” media scaremongering, when it’s quite clear from diverse eyewitness accounts that many of these attackers have been shot down, burned, electrocuted, fallen from a great height, or been crushed, only to recover to attack again. And no one knows why at least fifteen churches in Tennessee have reportedly closed their doors to non-believers. Battening down the hatches for the Rapture? You better believe it. Listen out for the sound of Heaven’s horns, people. And no one knows quite why that man in Chattanooga decapitated his baby son and three daughters while his wife was at work, or why police used machine guns against rioting civilians in Highland Park. People from Chattanooga, get on that choo-choo first chance you get. And folks are starting to ask why the President has yet to make a statement, why National Guard convoys are driving left and right, unable to find their own assholes, and why towns in Georgia and South Carolina are seeing vigilante gangs shooting people in the streets and burning their bodies. No one knows anything, people. And that’s why I’m remaining on air 24/7 from now on, because as soon as Richie Brock knows something, you will too. Remember, my number is-’

Jayne flicked the radio off and checked everything she’d laid out on her bed. Money, passport, purse, overnight bag, clothes. That was it. That was all she wanted to take, because everything else would remind her. .

She had called her cousin, forgetting that it was late in Britain. I’m coming to stay with you , she’d said, and she’d hung up as Jill had mumbled something through her sleepy confusion. At least she knew she was still there.

The bite throbbed. She hated looking at it, because it reminded her again of what she should have become. She should be out there with them now, racing through the streets and looking for someone else to bite. But all she felt was sickness with the pressure of restrained grief, and queasy with pain from the familiar hated fires in her joints.

They probably wouldn’t let her on a plane with her medicine.

Maybe all flights had been cancelled.

She wished she had a gun.

Jayne slammed her apartment door. She had a rucksack over one shoulder, a purse over the other, Tommy’s key fob in her hand, and a fresh bandage wrapped around her cleaned and sterilised wound.

‘. . in the head, this is what we’ve been told by email from someone calling themselves Wendy Coldbrook. “Shoot them in the head — I’ve done it, and it works.” So there you have it, folks. We’re being attacked by zombies! Crack out the bourbon, batten down the hatches, and get that survival plan you’ve been working on for fucking years into action. Whoop whoop! It’s Thriller time!’

Jonah sat in silence at last, satisfied that he had at last been mentioned, but unable to listen to any more radio reports — confusion, fear, religious tirades, hysteria, ridicule — and overwhelmed by the mass of information pouring out onto the Internet. There were a thousand accounts, many of them undoubtedly made up, but among them he perceived a few that must be true.

Perhaps some people would heed his advice.

He needed to rest, although he was not yet alone. There was a sense of something else sharing Coldbrook with him, perhaps a fellow skulking survivor avoiding him, maybe other members of the afflicted that he had not yet found. But in truth it felt like neither of these. Twice over the past couple of hours he had seen something that had sparked terrible memories. Once he had seen a shadow of something inhuman, slipping around a corner when he approached as if it had been repulsed by Jonah’s own shadow. And when he got to Control and tried to wedge the door closed — the locking system destroyed by whatever Satpal had done to it — he’d looked up into the glass wall, and his reflection had been wrong. The glass was misted by a strange fog issuing from the breach, so the image was unclear, but he had seen swollen eyes and a protruding snout, and bristles across his scalp holding glinting diamonds of moisture.

My nightmare! A blink, and the image was gone. All the way back to Secondary, he was certain that he was being followed.

Safely locked away again, Jonah breathed in deeply, listening to the sounds of his own body, feeling his weakening heart surging on in his chest. He’d sent Vic to Marc, and through the two of them he could focus all his attempts to find out how to stop this.

It was not going to be easy.

Coldbrook’s incredible achievement was tainted for ever.

He stared at the screen offering a view into the breach chamber, thought of poor lost Holly, and wondered what would come next.

There is a long, high wall surrounding the courtyard. In the courtyard, dozens of people are hustling to load a pile of green boxes into the luggage compartment of a huge bus. The vehicle is battered and filthy. The people appear worried but orderly. All except one woman screaming in French about judgement and sin, and whose loose robes appear to be soiled with her own madness. The others avoid the woman, but some glance at her with impatience, or anger.

From somewhere beyond the wall there comes the dreadful hooting sound that Jonah has heard before, echoed through a thousand mouths. Atop the wall, four men dash back and forth on metal walkways, looking down the other side. They’re carrying guns, and Jonah wonders why they are not shooting.

A man and woman are working beneath the bus’s raised engine cover. He can hear them talking in hushed, urgent tones, and the people coming back and forth with boxes glance warily their way.

On the wall a pulsing, flexing shadow is silhouetted against the bright sky. Jonah shields his eyes to see better, and he can make out limbs and heads and clawed hands as people start tumbling from the other side.

It’s all so hopeless.

More shouts, and the madwoman starts chanting something high and shrill.

There’s a gunshot and Jonah thinks, Fighting back . But one of the guards kicks up a cloud of dust as he hits the ground, his pistol still clasped in his left hand.

Useless to fight back. . pointless to resist the tide. . It is not his voice.

The trickle of bodies becomes a wave. They are being forced up and over from below, and the size of the pile of corpses necessary to get them over a twelve-foot wall must be unimaginable. That’s the clawing and scraping , Jonah thinks, clothes and fingers and teeth grating against the concrete wall . They flow onto the metal walkway and rain to the ground below, and set against the sky it seems to be one huge, grotesque living mass.

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-