Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘Last year,’ he said, touching the indentation in his left hip. ‘The year before.’ He held up his stump. ‘They lost control of the fury then, and by the time they smashed its skull it had chewed so hard that my bones fractured and crumbled.’ He touched the stump to the ruined cheek and eye socket. ‘Five years ago. Casey was holding the collar rod, she tripped, it took off part of my face and then turned on her. Drake was holding a dressing to my face, but I had one good eye left. I saw her fall, saw the life go from her eyes. And she stood again, and they fired an arrow through her head. Casey.’ He touched other scars one by one, but no longer relayed their history. Perhaps he was paying homage to Casey as the most important.

They bite him every year , Holly thought, trying to discern his intent. But his ruined face was unreadable, scar tissue having hardened it against the subtleties of expression. He’s immune, and they test him every year.

‘I’m not from your world,’ she said. ‘I came through a breach from somewhere else. A parallel Earth. Another universe.’

‘Whatever,’ he said, his one eye glittering. He grinned again, started singing once more, a wordless tune. Then he cut off his song. ‘One thing I ask, and I ask it of everyone, only when they get down here, though, not so Drake could hear, if Drake knew he wouldn’t approve, so don’t-’

‘No,’ she said, trying to sound strong but hearing only fear in her voice.

‘Don’t interrupt.’ He moved quickly, pinning her back against the table. ‘The one thing I ask is. . when I’m inside you, I like to be bitten.’

She shoved him back, pushing away from the table and heaving with all her strength. Mannan stumbled back against the bed, laughing, touching his scars again, one after the other and perhaps in the order of their annual origins, and as he came at her once more Holly realised that he was down here because he was mad.

She darted to the left, heading for the gap in the room divider, but he was quick, and lithe for his age. He rolled across the bed and jumped over the divider, kicked a floor cushion, tripped her. By the time she’d gained her feet he was at the door. He shoved it closed.

‘Let me out,’ she said.

‘You knew what you were doing, coming down here,’ Mannan said. ‘They told you what you were doing, and what would happen, and that you need my child. So don’t be afraid. I might be scarred up here. .’ He indicated his scars again, that sequence of touches that might have become some kind of personal prayer. ‘But I’m not scarred here .’ He unbuttoned his trousers and wriggled until they dropped. His erection sprang up, and he closed his hand around it, stroking.

Holly thought of Vic and Jonah and the others at Coldbrook, and she felt certain that they were dead. If they were still alive, how could this be happening to her? How could she be so alone and so threatened, here in the depths of another Coldbrook?

‘I told you, I’m not from here,’ she said. Her voice shook.

Mannan came forward, a monster from the mind of Goya.

Holly looked at his erection and smiled. He chuckled back at her — and she kicked him between his legs as hard as she could. He gasped in shock, then screamed louder in agony, and for a crazy moment she wanted to stay and apologise. But he grabbed for her foot, and when she took one step away from him she found it easier to take another.

‘One more scar, fucker,’ she said. Then she ran.

‘I am the Inquisitor,’ the voice said, ‘and you will be the same.’

Jonah opened his eyes and looked around his room. Nothing.

‘See what we have done,’ the man said. Jonah tried to sit up, but there was a pressure on his shoulders, pushing him back down. That flailing red organ was pressing against his head once more. The Inquisitor was standing behind his bed, upside down in his vision and even more grotesque.

He sees people on a beach and drowning in the emerald sea, trying to escape the deadly tide from inland.

‘A living history of the greatest Inquisition,’ the man said, lifting the orb away momentarily. Jonah gasped as he was pulled from the dream, glimpsing once again that smudged tattoo on the Inquisitor’s arm. He felt around on the bed for his gun, his finger brushed cold metal, and-

He looks across the countryside at a farm, where cattle lie dead and bloated in untended fields and winged things swoop in to chew on them, carrion creatures almost the size of the cattle themselves, their auburn and white fur glimmering with wet blood.

‘And your world now needs you to write its final book.’ The Inquisitor was beside the bed now, sticky wet mask held inches from his face. He pressed forward with the thing in his other hand one more time. Jonah lifted the gun. The Inquisitor moved swiftly, knocking the weapon back onto the bed, and Jonah felt those tendrils kissing his temple again, wondering if he was already dead. .

Eight people rush across red sands, eight hundred follow, and it is the living who will lose this race. .

Men and women with pronounced brows, wide faces, and more hair than anyone he has ever seen pursue the uninfected past a high bamboo wall. .

Thousands of dead bob in the ocean, clawing at the hull of a ship drifting in their midst. .

Biting, screaming, dying, rising, he saw it all, realising that much of what he was seeing was not from this world but another.

And he had the dreadful sense of another mind existing alongside his own, believing that this all constituted a great cleansing.

When the Inquisitor finally left him and Jonah sat up, he raised the gun and lifted it towards his head, remembering his father’s face and the strength he had given his son. ‘I am being strong,’ he said, but something knocked the gun aside. He tried again, and it happened once more. There was nothing in the room with him. The muscles in his arm flexed, the skin was depressed as though squeezed by fingers, and for all the world he would have loved to believe it was Wendy insisting that he remain alive.

But he knew that was a lie.

It was three hours before Sean was able to use the phone. Jayne had watched him trying again and again, had seen the subdued fear behind his eyes, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask.

Outside the aircraft, fires raged in the airport terminal. The two of them kept away from the windows, afraid of being seen.

‘They’re aimless,’ Jayne had said, watching one man stagger crablike across the wide concrete runway. His head rested on his left shoulder, and one leg was turned so that the foot faced backwards.

‘Only when there’s no one to bite,’ Sean had replied.

Jayne tried not to think about what would happen if they were discovered. The door was securely closed, and the only other way up to the aircraft cabin was to climb the wheel structures. We’re an island , she thought, imagining them surrounded by a sea of quiet, patient zombies. Perhaps they would gather and wait, a hundred of them or a thousand, or ten thousand when everyone else had been infected. Their purpose would not be complete until everyone was like them, and they would stare up at the aircraft windows, looking for signs of movement there and at the plane’s doors, standing through darkness and light, rain and sun, until something happened.

‘We’re trapped here,’ she said.

Sean’s face lit up.

‘Reception!’ he said suddenly, walking away from Jayne as he tapped in a number, then standing with his back to her and the phone held against his ear. He dialled again, stood listening. And again.

‘Sean.’

‘Maybe she’s out,’ he said.