Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

Hand over hand, ever cautious, Vic descended from rung to rung. He glanced down when he thought he was almost there, to find he was only halfway down.

‘Bloody cold out here,’ he said, and he heard Marc laugh in his ear. But no one else replied. This action was all down to Vic, and keeping his concentration tightly focused was paramount. There could be no distractions.

A gust of wind set him swaying. He clung on tight and closed his eyes, stomach lurching as he felt himself swinging through the air. He looked up again and saw Marc looking into the cabin, then back down at him.

‘Sorry!’ Gary said. ‘The fire’s whipping up a windstorm. Don’t want to hurry you, but-’

‘Yeah,’ Vic said. As he started down again Marc’s voice crackled through his earpiece.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Vic, you got trouble.’

‘What?’

‘Down. Look down.’

Vic looked down. The drifting helicopter had dragged the rest of the ladder from the wing, and now it was unfurled all the way to the ground. And the things were already trying to climb up it.

The first one was the tall cop, his face bitten off, teeth bared because he had no lips.

‘Hold on!’ Gary said. ‘I’ll swing around and-’

‘No time,’ Vic said softly. ‘Can’t risk them catching me. They’re not worried about dying.’

‘Oh, Vic,’ Lucy said, but he did not reply, did not even want to give voice to his despair. He had seconds, and every one of them had to count.

He glanced up. Marc leaned out of the doorway, aiming the rifle down.

‘Vic, I can’t see past you.’

‘I’ve got it. Gary, hold that fucker still!’ He turned sideways to the ladder and threaded his left arm and right leg through, bending his elbow and grabbing a rung above him, pulling his knee around the rope, and tugging the gun from his belt with his right hand. It slipped in his palm, and he cried out as it almost fell from his grasp.

‘Fuck!’

The faceless cop was a dozen rungs below him and scrambling up the rope ladder, hands and feet missing every third or fourth rung, one eye gone, the other bloodshot and burst, and Vic had no idea how he could see or sense anything.

He clasped the gun tightly, aimed down at the cop’s bloody face and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

‘Safety!’ Marc screamed in his ear, and Vic flipped the safety lever with his thumb and pulled the trigger again.

The cop’s head flipped back and bits of it spattered down across the white wing below them. He held on for a few seconds, a woman in a bright floral dress tearing at his feet and trousers in her frenzy to get past him. Then he fell back into empty air and took her with him. They both struck the leading edge of the massive wing and spun into the manic crowd below.

The rest of the ladder was clear.

‘Fucking hell,’ Marc said. ‘Lucy, he’s fine. Fucking hell.’

‘Couldn’t put it better myself,’ Vic said. He hung there for a moment, not daring to move in case his thundering heart shook him from the ladder. He didn’t deserve to fall after marksmanship like that.

Thirty seconds later he was on the wing, pulling the ladder back up before more of the zombies could climb it. And twenty feet away the emergency door in the fuselage swung open. He crouched down and aimed the gun, and the man who emerged held up his hands, displaying his own gun tucked into his belt.

‘You the sky marshal?’ Vic shouted.

‘Yeah. But who the hell are you?’

‘Wyatt Earp.’ The woman who emerged after the man grinned, glancing up at the hovering helicopter. ‘Wyatt Earp, that’s who he is. Come to restore justice to Zombie Town.’

‘Gotta admit, that was some shooting,’ the sky marshal said.

Vic started shaking. He sat down heavily on the wing before enjoying the contact as the man and woman shook his hand and helped him up. He told them to go first because he had to pull himself together before climbing again. The two men watched the woman’s slow climb, and Vic was aware enough to notice the bandage on her arm.

‘She was really bitten?’ he asked.

‘She was,’ the other man said. ‘Seconds away from getting her brains bashed out by the passengers.’

‘And what happened to them?’

The man heard him but didn’t answer. Neither did his expression change. He watched as the woman reached the top of the ladder and was helped into the helicopter before he spoke again.

‘That’s some girl,’ he said. ‘That really is some girl.’

We’ll see , Vic thought. Then he pointed at the ladder, pleased that his hand was no longer shaking. ‘After you.’

They would have tried reaching Jonah by now. If his calls had made waves, then Coldbrook’s surface enclosures would be swarming with military, and they would have worked their way down to him with cutting equipment or explosives.

So it was obvious that there was no one. He was alone down here with no knowledge of what was happening in the world above, and with the Inquisitor getting ready to turn him into one of his own. Ridiculous, and yet Jonah could not rationalise his way out of this understanding. He was being harried by something he could not explain.

Control and the breach chamber were still barricaded with the furniture he had put back outside the compromised door. He started pulling it away, aware all the time of the weight of the gun in his belt. It seemed to do no good against the Inquisitor, but Jonah himself was still human flesh and blood. Alive or dead, he intended to stay that way.

The Inquisitor was behind him, out of sight, somewhere in the darkened facility. He shone his heavy torch back along the corridor, but saw nothing. That only filled him with dread.

You’ll live for ever , the Inquisitor had said, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything worse. These many years without Wendy had been bad enough; eternity without her was unthinkable.

He pulled the last chair away, peered into the room and shone his torch around. Shadows stretched and shifted from behind the many control desks and terminals. Jonah entered Control and almost went to look at the corpse from the other Earth. But he did not have the luxury of time.

‘So there it is,’ he said, standing a dozen steps from the breach as he had so many times since its formation. It was night through there now, and what little of the landscape he could see was heavily shadowed. His heart was thudding, skipping a beat every now and then as it so often did nowadays. He held his hand to his chest. That bastard wanted to open me up .

Holly had punched off the eradicator so that she could escape through, but Jonah had no idea whether it had been set on a time delay. And with power off there was no way to find out. The core, and therefore the breach and its associated containment and eradicator, was self-sustaining, but now impossible to assess.

Something scraped against the floor. He wasn’t sure where the sound had come from or what had caused it, but he held his breath and listened for more. Nothing.

‘Time to get out of here,’ Jonah muttered, drawing the gun from his waistband. He was nowhere near prepared but he could stay no longer.

He strode towards the breach, the threat of being killed by the eradicator a remote concern because he would feel nothing. His body would close down, his mind following soon after, and perhaps he would die thinking of Wendy and everything they had not had time to do together.

As he was about to enter, hair standing on end and body tingling all over, he saw a shadow moving towards him. He raised the gun, heavy and comforting in his hand. Perhaps I’m seeing myself , he thought, because he had no idea what crossing between this world and another might do.