Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

He held his breath.

The lights went out as the power failed, and the laptop switched to battery mode, flashing a red-highlighted message:

Net connection terminated .

The aircraft was mostly silent, even though it was full, and many people were concentrating on their mobile and laptop screens. Jayne had taken a walk to the bathroom an hour into the flight, and the sight of so many people with their heads tilted down had been unsettling. The night flight passenger compartment was darkened, and the glow from screens and phones had formed islands of light across the cabin. People had been whispering, and one woman was crying. Bet none of them have seen what I’ve seen , Jayne had thought, and in the toilet she too had cried.

An old episode of Friends was playing on her seat-back screen, but Jayne saw none of it. The One Where They’re All Eaten By Zombies , she’d thought as the programme had begun, but she hadn’t found it in herself to smile.

The churu had started to settle in her joints and bones, and for the past hour she had been steadily massaging her hips and shoulders. The man beside her hadn’t seemed to notice, or if he had he’d not seen any reason to comment. Stranger things were happening. Worse things. She shifted in her seat and groaned as her hips flexed. The man glanced up, then down again at his netbook.

‘It’s the bites,’ he said. They were his first words since the start of the journey.

‘Bites,’ she repeated. The pain in her arm was a sharp slice down to her bone. It was a different pain from the churu — a wound rather than a blazing ache — and she concentrated on it because it was easier to control.

‘Fucked up,’ the man muttered, and he started tapping at his computer again.

Jayne looked out of the window; she didn’t want to see the computer screen. There was nothing to see outside but she couldn’t sleep with this pain, so staring into the darkness was the next best thing. She kept massaging herself — left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder — and she twisted and flexed her ankles and knees, trying to work blood through her joints. But however much she worked at herself, she knew she’d need help to walk by the time they reached London.

A slow, misty warmth began behind her eyes, and she closed them, trying to will the fainting away. It was never the pain that drove her down into these comas — the worst agonies conspired to keep her awake — but something else to do with the churu. It’s getting inside my head , she’d said to Tommy, but she had tried denying to herself that the blackouts were getting more frequent, and deeper every time.

It was bad enough having a body she couldn’t rely on. The idea of losing her mind. . she could never live with that. Tommy had known that, too. And they’d never discussed it, because they were both afraid of what she would ask of him.

‘Shit,’ she slurred, and the mist thickened into a fog.

You okay? she heard from some distance. She tried to nod but that swilled her brain around in her head, her eyes bulged with the pressure, and she squeezed her fingers into her thighs, hoping the pain might bring her around. But she was a slave to pain, not its master, and the voice mumbled something from afar as the darkness pulled her down.

Tommy, slow down , she tries to shout, because he is driving too fast across the mountainside, they are hitting rocks and dips in the ground, and his beloved old Toyota is being shaken apart. Tommy does not answer because he is not driving — the thing that is driving is no one she knows, and nothing alive — and as she opens her mouth to scream, she opens her eyes as well.

On the small screen in front of her, three children played in a garden, spraying a St Bernard with a hose.

Jayne blinked a few times, trying to focus through the pain. She shifted in her seat and cried out, and her heartbeat set whispers echoing in her ears. Her joints burned, but her vision and other senses were rising from the blackout. How long? she wondered, and she turned to the man beside her to ask the time.

He was gone. So were the people across the aisle from them, every seat empty. And past the opposite aisle, more empty seats. She turned and looked between the seat uprights, groaning again at the pain in her stiffened shoulders. No one.

Everyone was gone.

Wake up, Jayne , she thought. The guy had dropped his laptop on his seat, and the screen showed a photo of a beautiful woman and two young kids. Screen saver , she thought. How long have I been out? And if this was still a dream, the woman and kids would have flesh between their teeth.

Her jacket had been sliced off, ragged cuts up the sleeves showing clumsy scissor cuts. Her shirt had been pulled open, her bra sliced in two, and her breasts and stomach were exposed.

‘What the hell. .?’ she said, and it was when she grabbed her opened shirt to cover herself that she saw the wound on her arm. The dressing had been ripped back and now hung by one strip of tape. The scabbed bite was exposed, seeping a dribble of thin blood.

It’s the bites , the man had said. Jayne pulled her shirt closed, grabbed the seat in front of her and stood, growling her agony between gritted teeth.

The whispers in her ears became startled voices, not her heartbeat at all, and though she heard no words she understood their fear well enough.

They were standing along the aisle, clumped together and staring at her across the heads of empty seats. Terrified.

‘I’m. .’ she said, and then a man appeared beside her from the other direction, moving quickly and keeping low. There were grey flecks in his closely cropped hair and his eyes flashed wide and white against his brown skin.

In his hands was a squat pistol.

And he had been paying attention to the news, because it was aimed directly at her head.

Holly stared about her in disbelief, the words ‘ Welcome to Coldbrook ’ echoing inside her head. She started to panic, her palms growing damp and her heart racing. Just as shock threatened to overwhelm her there was a brief sting on her neck that spread to burn through her entire being. And then, darkness.

When she woke her whole body felt as though it had been subjected to an intimate, thorough medical examination — she seemed to be naked and her limbs ached.

She was too scared to open her eyes, terrified of what she would see.

Her senses swam. She could smell musty wool and stale bread, and the unmistakable scent of her own body odour. Her breathing seemed to reverberate, the whole space around her gasping in time with her exhalations. She clenched her fingers, rucking up a rough blanket, and then her arm came painfully to life with a thousand pins and needles. She gave a shuddering sob and tears dribbled into her hair.

At last Holly opened her eyes to see what they had done to her.

The cell was small, a cave more than a structure, with a floor hewn flat and the raised bed she lay on hacked from the wall. Layers of animal skins and holed blankets softened the bed, and she was swathed in a heavy quilt. She wiped at her tears and glanced beneath the covering. She was not naked after all: the dark green smock she wore resembled the clothing worn by her rescuers.

‘Rescuers,’ she croaked, and wondered how wrong she might be.

Holly sat up, coughing, wishing for a drink. Her eyes felt gritty, her mouth and throat dry, and there was a pressure in her bladder that she was doing her best to ignore. The room contained no toilet area, and the only other fixture was an oil lamp high on one wall. It threw out a surprising amount of light and heat but, when she stood to examine it closer, dizziness hit her.