Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

One had been attacking, one defending. The final defence had been suicide.

Though the power was out, Holly still stayed a couple of steps away, examining the mess of scorched flesh and material and trying to see where one body ended and the other began. It was grotesque. She felt sick and unsettled, shining her torch across motionless bodies.

She stamped her foot and made some noise. No movement. The brain could be destroyed in more ways than one, but she still had to be careful.

Undoing her tool belt, she took out a telescopic wooden pointer and started nudging at the bodies. The pointer sank in and she cringed in disgust — the disturbance seemed to release the smell. It rose around her and she tried breathing through her mouth, but then she could taste the greasy reality of death.

Gotta get this done as quickly as possible . She fixed a voltmeter to the end of the pointer and started testing the bodies and the equipment they had melted into for any signs of power. There were none.

Holly got to work.

She had to scrape cooked flesh away from the damaged control panel. Some of it crumbled away and that was fine, but some was still moist. It stank. She gagged in the confined space, determined not to vomit because that would only add to the reek. She tried not to identify what she was seeing, but sometimes the fingernails were obvious, and she had to crack a jawbone to prise teeth from around a thick cable.

She worked at the damage, and every now and then she heard Jonah calling her name. ‘Almost done,’ she said several times, and she lost track of time as she worked. The toolkit carried some spares, but in other areas she had to steal fittings from boards and equipment which she knew were non-essential. Six feet from here was a TV and audio distribution panel, and she didn’t think that she and Jonah would be watching reruns of Lost again any time soon.

The first time she heard the scraping she thought she’d dropped and trodden on one of her tools. Immersed as she was in the repair work, she did not check. The second time, she knew that she had not moved at all.

‘Hear something,’ Jonah shouted.

Holly looked down. The corpses were moving. The part grabbing for her was identifiable only by its watch, and even then it was barely recognisable as a hand.

She grabbed for her gun and dropped it. It bounced, flipped between the gangway’s safety rails, and she heard its impact down in the dark a few seconds later.

‘Jonah!’

‘. . to check. .’ she heard, his voice further away than ever.

‘Jonah!’

The thing shifted for her, rising up. As a hand grasped her belt and pulled her down, Holly tried to scream.

7

Jonah didn’t want to leave but the noises drew him away.

It wasn’t until Holly had returned through the breach that he had acknowledged his ownership of this place. Being here on his own had been bad enough, but now that Holly had seen what had become of Coldbrook he was suddenly more protective of the facility. It was a part of him that had been hurt.

Holly was working hard to repair the power, and simply waiting out in the corridor felt far too passive. She was safe. She would succeed.

And that noise. .

As Jonah hurried along the corridor curving around the core he tried to analyse the sound. It was a distant whisper, yet he knew it would be loud close-up. Scratching and whipping, like twigs or branches scraping against a window.

At the foot of the narrow stairs he suddenly knew where the noise was coming from, and realised that he should have known from the beginning. He glanced back the way he’d come, listening for Holly. All was quiet. So he passed the staircase and continued along to Control, afraid that the Inquisitor would be waiting for him around every bend.

Even before he approached Control’s glass wall, he could see the frenetic movement within. Strange torchlight was flickering and fading as something moved across the large room.

He moved to the glass and looked in. Something ricocheted from the wall, leaving a wide, starred impact mark. An arrow! Jonah jerked back.

Sweet Jesus .

The conflict raged in silence behind the glass. A fury turned towards him and climbed across one of the workstations, knocking a broken computer screen to the floor, sprawling out of sight and then standing again. It came for him, striking the window and rebounding, then bashing at the glass with knotted fists. Bits of it broke away. It was very, very old, and this close he could see that its eyes were shrivelled and dry.

Several shadows stood or squatted just within the breach, firing bolts and arrows into the mass of zombies. Jonah checked the furniture that he and Holly had piled outside the doors. It seemed secure. But he was shaken, and as he backed away along the corridor everything inside him screamed at him to wait. Soon they would be through, and he wanted to be there for that moment. He wanted to see those people from another Earth. But he had a responsibility to Holly, and even more so to Coldbrook.

Furies fell, and the air in Control filled with the dust of ages.

Holly brought the screwdriver down again and again, each impact juddering through her hand and wrist and arm. In the wild torchlight bits spattered across her thighs and stomach, and she screamed to rid herself of the sickening noise, and retched to purge the terrible slick taste of the dead flesh. Now that it moved, it was easier to discern which body part was dead and which was not within this merged mass, because the fury had not begun to rot.

It fell away from her, its burned hands slipping down her body. The face was shattered from twenty impacts from the screwdriver, thirty, more. She kept striking until all movement ceased.

‘Jonah,’ she croaked, unable to shout. ‘Jonah.’ But she no longer needed Jonah. She stopped stabbing. The screwdriver felt like an extension of her hand, and she was unsure she’d ever be able to rid herself of its feel.

Holly turned away from what she had done.

‘Few switches blown,’ she said. Her hoarse voice was surprisingly loud in the dark space. She kept the torch beam on the tangled bodies, and now neither of them moved. Each time she breathed she tasted death. ‘I can take them from other boards. Clean it down. Make sure there’s no. . stuff still causing shorts.’

Talking to herself made it easier. She set to work again, slipping the screwdriver into her pocket first and wiping her hands on her trousers.

She cleaned the damaged board, bypassing a melted area, replacing wires with temporary cold-set solder, moving switches, cannibalising the distribution board that served the entertainment system.

Holly closed her eyes after a few minutes and took a deep breath, then carried on.

When she’d finished she stepped back, looking down at the corpses.

I got it all over my hands.

She flicked a lever switch on the board and heard the hum of power.

Under my nails, in the creases of my skin, and maybe I cut myself with the screwdriver .

From the plant room she saw a faint glow of light, and knew that her repair had worked, for now.

Jonah should be shouting but he’s not there, or if he is he’s waiting for me with his mouth open, his eyes empty .

‘Jonah?’ she said. She made her way back through to the plant room.

Jonah was not waiting there.

Outside, the corridor lights were on again, and she heard that low background hum of Coldbrook that until now she hadn’t realised had been absent. The hum of life , she thought, and she had never welcomed the thudding of her heart so much.

If she became a fury, would it cease?

Next to the plant room was a small closet-type door, and behind it she found stacks of cleaning equipment and products. The bleach was in a large industrial bottle, unbranded and strong, and Holly poured it over her hands, rubbing them together and crying as the fumes got into her eyes. She gagged, pouring more bleach because maybe the first splash hadn’t got right down into her nails, or into those wounds she could not see. It burned. It hurt.