Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘You know where else,’ Marc said. ‘I told you, I’m the best disease expert in the northern hemisphere.’

‘I thought you were boasting,’ Vic said, but he was thinking of Lucy and Olivia, and how safe they might be in that sparsely furnished room.

‘Here,’ Gary said.

‘Yes,’ Marc said. ‘We’ve got to fly to Baltimore and bring her back.’

It was Marc’s idea that Lucy and Olivia should go with them. Vic’s sense of relief when the phorologist suggested that they should stay together was immense — there was no way he’d ever have left them behind, but the thought of confronting Marc over that had troubled him.

Olivia knew that everything was wrong. She grasped her rag doll Scruffy in her left hand, and its hair was wet and stringy from where she’d been chewing. But how could he explain so that she would understand when he didn’t understand himself?

‘Where are we going?’ Olivia asked.

‘You ever been to Baltimore, honey?’ Gary asked.

‘Uhhh. .’ Olivia glanced up at Vic, then shook her head.

‘Well, we’re going to visit a lady there.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Jayne,’ Gary said.

‘But can we fly in the dark?’

‘My helicopter is special. It’s called an Agusta 109 — very nice, very expensive — and it has computers and electronic gizmos and other magic stuff, all there to tell us whether it’s safe to fly, and whether there’s anyone else close by.’

‘Magic.’ Olivia looked at Gary and giggled uncertainly.

Marc entered the room, a heavy bag over one shoulder, and when Vic offered to take it Marc shook his head. ‘Not now,’ he said quietly.

Gary made a pantomime of putting on his cowboy hat and leaving the room, then turned back and knelt so that he was on Olivia’s level. ‘Say, honey, you want to come and sit in the pilot’s seat?’

‘Yeah!’ the girl said.

‘Is it safe?’ Lucy asked.

‘It’s fine,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve just been up there to check.’

Olivia and Gary left, and Marc placed the bag on a desk. The desk’s legs creaked, and Vic saw the sheen of sweat across the man’s forehead. He knew what he was carrying.

‘I hate guns,’ Lucy said, moving to Vic’s side so that their arms pressed together.

‘And I hate zombies,’ Marc said, hefting the bag again. ‘Shall we?’

Olivia was sitting in the helicopter wearing the pilot’s helmet, its dark visor down, while Gary sat next to her, running through a pre-flight check. Vic saw her through the windshield and felt an intense gratitude. How Gary had managed to get her across the roof and into the machine without her seeing or hearing any of the chaos below, Vic did not know. But he would have to thank the man later.

From the roof, everything they saw of Cincinnati meant death. Fires consumed the city, screams gave the fires voice, and the stink of cooking flesh added an extra dimension of nightmare to the screams. At least one of the city centre’s distant skyscrapers was ablaze, and a series of mysterious explosions thumped in the far distance.

Once on board and strapped in, Gary gave them all a brief rundown of what to do if they had to perform an emergency landing on land or in water. It felt like a pointless exercise, but Vic saw that Lucy was paying strict attention, and he had something else to thank the pilot for. They had wrapped the rifles in heavy coats, not wanting Olivia to see them.

But as they took off from the building and headed east across the city’s northern extremes, it became impossible to hide anything. Olivia sat between Lucy and Vic, each of them holding her hand, but her helmeted head turned left and right as she looked from the aircraft’s large door windows. They left Cincinnati behind, and as they flew over farmsteads, towns and cities, some areas had fallen into darkness, blocks of shadow surrounded by illuminated streets and buildings. And there were the fires, frequent conflagrations ranging from single house fires to a huge, advancing wall of flame that looked like a boiling rip in the land.

‘Is that a volcano?’ Olivia asked, shouting above the sound of the motor.

‘It’s a fire, honey,’ Vic said.

‘It’s very big.’

An hour out of Cincinnati, Gary shouted something unintelligible and the helicopter shook, rocked and dipped, accompanied by a terrific noise. Vic leaned across and hugged Olivia and Lucy towards him, an instinctive embrace. But Gary quickly brought them under control, and they could all hear his rapid breathing in their headphones.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Marc shouted.

‘Fighter jet,’ Gary said. ‘Barely saw it.’

‘I’m scared!’ Olivia said. ‘And Marc swore.’

Marc nudged Gary, then touched his headphones. Gary nodded and flicked a switch.

‘Okay, guys, here’s the news. I can’t raise Baltimore airport at all. I’ve spoken to two en routes — they’re the centres that control air traffic — and neither of them were interested.’

‘Not interested ?’ Vic asked.

‘One woman. . I’ve never heard a controller sounding like that. It wasn’t even panic, it was more like resignation. She said the military has so much stuff up that it’s proving impossible for them to function.’

‘Meaning what?’ Marc asked.

‘Daddy?’ Olivia said, and Vic squeezed her knee.

‘Just grown-up stuff,’ he said.

‘It means we’re flying on our own,’ Gary said. ‘That’s no bad thing normally, but the way things are I won’t know what we’re flying into.’

‘Like that jet,’ Lucy said.

‘Like that jet,’ Marc echoed.

They fell silent. Olivia still held Vic’s hand, her grip hot and clammy with fear. Vic watched the dark sky beyond the windows, noticed that the moon was low and yellow, and wondered whether they would even see anything that might come to smash them to atoms.

America passed beneath them, burning.

If Wendy had come back to him as one of those things, Jonah would have understood. It would hardly have been a surprise — he’d seen them kill, he had shot some himself, and the images of their grinding teeth and rupturing skulls were imprinted for ever on his mind. His waking nightmares made him terrified to sleep. And if she had returned as the Inquisitor, he would have understood that as well. The Inquisitor was in his mind now, and sometimes Jonah believed that thing was steering his every action, subconsciously or not.

But Wendy came back as herself.

I’d never let you put that gun to your head , she said, sitting at the foot of his bed. Jonah knew that she was not real, yet he welcomed her here with him, reaching out and not quite touching. She seemed unaware of his distress, or his need for contact. She looked vaguely disapproving, as she had on those few occasions when he’d returned home after having drunk too much.

‘But I don’t know what else to do,’ he said.

There is always another way. You told me that when I was so ill, and I wanted to talk about-

‘No!’ Jonah said. He had never entertained the thought of helping her on her way, had never permitted her to talk about it. Many times since then he had felt the guilt of that, and had dreamed about the agony he might have saved her from.

You’re not in that much pain , Wendy said, scolding. So don’t you dare let yourself consider that now, Jonah Jones. There is always another way .

Jonah blinked and Wendy disappeared.

Got to get away , he thought. The gun sat on his bedside table, solid evidence of his despair. But he would not betray Wendy with such thoughts again, and even now they felt distant and alien to him, the remnants of a dream rather than of any real desire to end his own life.