Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘But the core?’ Marc asked.

‘Balanced, and self-sustaining. It doesn’t need any outside power source.’

‘So why not run Coldbrook from the core?’ Gary asked.

‘Because you don’t use antimatter to run your food blender,’ Vic said.

Gary raised his eyebrows, then smiled. ‘Forgive me. I’m just a musician.’ His smile was disarming, his eyes filled with a constant glimmer.

‘Gary owns the chopper that you saw,’ Marc said.

Vic stepped forward and held out his hand. Gary shook it without hesitation and Vic was relieved. He was sure that Marc must have told him what he’d done.

‘So what’s been happening?’ Vic asked.

‘You missed the President’s address,’ Marc said. He nodded at an open laptop on the benching. Its screen saver was a butterfly shedding sparkling dust as it flapped its wings. It was simply beautiful.

‘And what a joke that was,’ Gary said.

‘Want to see it?’ Marc asked.

Vic blinked, uncertain, because yes, he did. Gary snorted, and Marc tapped a few keys. When the clip started, he moved the slider along until it was a couple of minutes in.

‘This is the interesting bit,’ Marc said, and he hit play.

The President flickered as the clip began, his face shimmering, and Vic remembered the hope they had all felt when he had taken office, and the belief that he might alter their broken country. Now he had something else to say. And though he clung to hope, Vic could see shadows in the man’s eyes.

‘. . to combat the spread of the infection, while our scientists strive to understand it and create a means of treating it. And I would say to the press and the media that they are not helping matters with sensationalised reports, and that they could provide a valuable service to the country by helping, rather than criticising and hindering, official efforts to take control of the situation. They can begin helping by broadcasting this important announcement, and making sure it is spread as far as possible: There is now an immunity register published online, and I would urge anyone who suspects that they, or anyone they know, are immune from the infection to enter their details in the register. Links to the register can be found on the front pages of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, other social networking sites, and all major search engines and email providers.’ He took a pause, and just for a moment — perhaps the space of a blink, but Vic knew he had not imagined it — the President’s lip quivered. But he was too strong to reveal his tears. ‘This is not a plague of zombies,’ he said. ‘It is a terrible disease, and soon we shall find a cure. Thank you.’ The President turned to leave, and as the assembled journalists started shouting Marc cancelled the clip.

‘Immunity register?’ Vic asked.

Marc clicked on a bookmarked website. ‘As quickly as new names go up, older entries are being marked red.’ He pointed at the red-blocked screen. ‘Discounted. The pattern’s pretty fucking consistent.’

Vic blinked at the screen, then turned away. ‘They’re taking steps,’ he said.

‘But it doesn’t help us,’ Marc said. ‘Here.’ He tapped a few keys and a map of the USA filled the screen. It was blank, a simple outline with fainter lines indicating state boundaries. There was a colour-coded key down the left-hand side, and a line of editing icons across the top. ‘This is a program I’ve been working on for a while. It can plot disease vectors, reported outbreaks, confirmed outbreaks, and lots of other stuff.’

‘Such as?’

‘Pretty much anything you want. Code input differently and it’ll bring up a different map. Convert it into graphs, or hard-data listings. So we can plot incidences of immunity, designated safe areas. . anything there’s data on. I’ve set it to follow all the online news channels. Uses word-recognition software to plot reported outbreaks. And it follows more reliable sites to plot confirmed outbreaks.’

‘What other sites?’

‘A variety,’ Marc said. ‘Military, Homeland Security. Stuff I shouldn’t have access to. I set up an automatic renewal on a search engine, repeating searches every ten seconds, and then word recognition again on the blogs it brings up.’

‘What words did you use?’

‘Zombie. Do you think we need any other?’

‘Zombie,’ Vic said, staring at the screen. ‘So how does this help us?’

‘It doesn’t,’ Marc said. ‘Not in the slightest.’ He sat back and pointed at the keyboard. ‘Hit enter.’

‘What am I seeing?’

‘Rate and extent of spread.’

Vic hit enter and sat back. A clock at the screen’s top right started at 00:00, and progressed half an hour every ten seconds. And in a little over eight minutes, he saw what he had done.

The outbreak centred on Coldbrook, in the southern arm of the Appalachians. To begin with the spread was slow, and the red dot barely changed for the first two hours. At hours three to five it snaked from that area a little, several distinct lines of red bleeding outward along roads. And once the roads were lit red, the spread happened faster. At hour six it flooded Greenville in the south, at hour eight Knoxville to the north. And then the spread increased, the red smudge bleeding outwards as if it was a schematic of the land’s greatest wound. Highways fed the spread, and the landscapes around them were soon flooded as well. At hour fifteen, Atlanta, Charlotte, Louisville and Nashville were within its grasp.

‘Got a cousin in Nashville,’ Gary said. ‘Top bloke. Barman.’

‘This just marks distinct outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Once they reach a certain concentration, the program fills in the surroundings.’

Vic waited a further couple of minutes until the program ended, frozen in time over twenty hours from when he had got out of Coldbrook. Then he sat back and held his hands to his face.

‘The military?’

‘As you’d expect,’ Marc said. ‘National Emergency, the Guard called up, doing everything in their power, blah-di-fucking blah. Offered my services, they just said they had their own people. But they don’t have what we have — Jonah, and Coldbrook.’

‘Had,’ Vic said.

‘He’ll get back online. He has to.’

‘Haven’t they sent anyone to Coldbrook?’ Vic asked, realising that he should have asked Jonah.

‘I asked,’ Marc said. ‘They told me that information was classified. So I made a call, spoke to a guy I know. The term he used was clusterfuck.’

‘And you’ve missed all the political shouting,’ Gary said. ‘National, international. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world’s watching this in real-time. All flights from the States turned back, north and south borders closed.’ He laughed out loud, a shocking sound. ‘Lot of good that will do! Like closing the borders to flies.’

‘What are these?’ Vic asked. Initially he’d believed that the scattered red dots elsewhere across the country might have been a fault on the laptop screen, or perhaps reports of false sightings. But the more he looked at them, the more they seemed to blink like red eyes.

‘Isolated outbreaks,’ Marc said. ‘Something like this doesn’t just spread evenly.’

‘But Jacksonville? Dallas?’

‘People run,’ Gary said. ‘Christ knows I would.’

‘I did,’ Vic said softly.

‘And that’s why the spread can never be stopped physically,’ Marc said. ‘Gary’s fly comment is pretty good, but still not accurate. There’s film all over the Internet of these things being shot, but short of building a five-thousand-mile-long wall to contain the whole area. .’ He raised his hands despairingly. ‘There are planes, trains, cars, helicopters, boats. Those infected don’t show intelligence — certainly no more than a rudimentary memory, and perhaps a basic ability to learn through repetition. But they could be trapped in a hold or a car’s trunk. Or maybe the infection can survive for a time in spilled blood.’