Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘How did something get past the-?’

‘Vic, it attacked Melinda.’

‘What? How?’

‘Bit her. Bad. But then she. . I thought she was dead , but she. .’

‘Jonah?’

‘Need to control this until we can. .’ He was panting harder now, each breath a gasp. ‘. . can figure out. .’

‘Is Holly safe?’

‘Don’t know. Meet me in Secondary.’

‘Okay.’ And before he could say anything else Jonah signed off. Vic stared at the satphone for a few seconds as if expecting it to buzz into life again.

He snapped up his palmtop computer, patched into the wireless network and then accessed the facility’s remote cameras. It took two attempts to enter the correct password, and for a panicked moment he feared that some security-conscious employee had changed it. But then the thumbnail images sprang up, and he scrolled across to Control.

Even before maximising the image, he could see how bad it was.

Control was in chaos. Someone was shooting, the gunfire somehow seeming even more violent without sound. Blood was splashed across the floor, pooled around a prone shape.

Vic gasped, looked for Holly, brought the palmtop closer to his face. But he couldn’t make anyone out.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Something came through and Vic couldn’t see what that something might be. Whatever it was, it had brought death.

Shaking, he dropped the palmtop face-down on the bed and dialled the first few numbers of his home landline. He paused, cancelled. It was four a.m. If he told Lucy that something was wrong, she might panic and let it slip to someone else. And he needed his family exactly where they were.

He paced his room, uncertain, clasping the phone, glancing again at the palmtop. Something came through, something attacked, and Holly was somewhere in there. His family would be asleep, Lucy lonely in the marital bed he had betrayed so much. His long-dead sister was right, he had told Holly that he loved her. But it was an illicit love, passion-driven, and nothing compared to what he felt for his family.

Vic was shaking.

As he blinked, he saw Lucy’s expression in his dream as Charlotte spewed out the sordid truth. The suspicion that existed in nightmare, and which perhaps he’d spied several times in the years since the affair had ended.

In the echo of Jonah’s gasping, panicked words, duty called. But Vic could only heed a far greater duty.

Panting, he dragged the gun box from beneath his bed and clicked though the numbers on the coded lock. The M1911 pistol went into his belt, along with three extra magazines. He hadn’t fired it for almost a year, when he’d hiked to a range high in the Appalachians to see how stale his shooting had become. He’d still been pretty good. Holding the pistol, feeling the rough grip, smelling the gun oil: it felt like a statement of intent.

The siren screeched again and again, and it could only be turned off from Control or Secondary. Jonah hadn’t reached Secondary yet, though it must only be a matter of seconds. And in Control, perhaps they were too busy.

‘Holly,’ he said out loud, and he thought back to the last time he’d spoken her name in this room. She hadn’t been here since the evening they ended their affair, when they’d sat together for half a night and had drunk three bottles of wine. Holly, you’re too special for me to lose , he’d said, and if we carry on I will lose you .

But your family are more special , she’d said. And she understood fully, she really did. That was why he still loved her. The sex was no longer there, but the friendship was priceless. Vic hoped that, if she was still alive, she would understand what he had to do now.

He had to abandon her.

‘Control’s locked down, can’t get in anyway,’ he whispered, justifying this new betrayal, thinking of the silent image of blood and shooting. ‘Whatever came through is trapped.’ And despite trying to convince himself that was true, his need to get his family as far away from here as possible was so pressing that it made him dizzy. Because he had always been afraid that something terrible might happen, and there was no telling what had just been released.

Vic left his room and slammed the door. At the junction, he looked left at where the corridor curved around towards the staircase leading down to Control and up to Secondary, and right at where it dog-legged away from the core and towards the common room and garage. He hesitated for only a second, and then turned right.

With every step he ran further from his professional responsibilities and the alarm screamed at his betrayal.

Alex shot Melinda five times. She fell back still biting, and the guard captain yelled as her teeth tugged away part of his face. She flipped onto her back and writhed for a second, bloody hands shoving at the motionless intruder from beyond the breach, and Holly thought, That’s it, she’s dead now, I’m sure I saw her spine -

Melinda sat up again, pushing with one hand and seemingly unaware of her new, terrible wounds.

‘Alex!’ Holly shouted, as if the captain would need warning about this pitiful, bloody wreck. But Alex was leaning back on his knees with a terrible, disbelieving look on his face. One hand still aimed the pistol at Melinda, the other was pressed against his cheek and jaw where she’d bitten him. He leaned further back, legs bent almost in half at the knee now, head almost touching the floor, and the gun made a metallic tink as it dropped from his hand. He grew still.

‘Sir!’ another guard said, moving closer.

‘Back,’ Satpal said. ‘Stay back! Can’t you see. .?’

‘See fucking what ?’ Holly said, and then the cosmologist was at her side. She could smell the sweat on him, the fear. She wondered if she smelled the same.

‘She can’t be getting up,’ he said softly. And Holly knew that he was right. No one leaks that much blood and lives. No one. .

‘Sir!’ another guard shouted, the one that Alex had sent away to fetch dressings to tend Melinda’s wounds. He stood close to the breach floor now, staring down at the massive pool of blood and the figures at its centre: the intruder, motionless with most of his head missing; Melinda, sitting up fully now, one arm propping her as she tried to get to her feet; and Alex, hand fallen from his face, horribly contorted and motionless.

‘What the fuck do we do?’ another guard said. He was standing ten feet to Holly’s left, pistol aimed at Melinda, his face pale. ‘Sir, what do we do?’ Holly realised that he was directing his questions at Alex.

The captain suddenly tensed, then raised himself back to a kneeling position. His mouth worked, but only a soft humming sound emerged from it. Holly could see his teeth through the wound in his cheek.

‘Shit,’ someone muttered. They could all see that the soldier’s movements were wrong.

‘We’re locked down in here,’ Holly said. ‘Two of you keep watch on the breach in case. .’ She shook her head. ‘You.’ She nodded at the guard with the field dressings. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Neil.’

‘Neil, I think Alex is. . is in shock.’ Alex was on his feet now, swaying forward and backward and looking around the room. There was something about his eyes. . They didn’t look shocked to Holly. They looked different . He looked at her, then at Satpal, then at the three other guards, two of them pointing guns at him. Blood spewed from his face, and Melinda was behind him now, a bloody, meaty mess who should have been. .

‘Melinda?’ Holly said softly, between a blast of the alarm’s loud siren. But the biologist did not seem to hear, and her previously beautiful face was gone, home now to red.