Coldbrook

sight behind the neighbouring cars.

Jayne screamed. She knew that she should remain silent, stay down and out of sight, but she was a different Jayne now, and she was more afraid than she had ever been before. She could see Tommy’s body in front of the car, but knew that everything had moved on.

She put her left hand over the bite on her right forearm. The blood was warm and sticky. They’re just biting, passing it on, rabies or something worse. She waited for whatever was to come, wondering if she’d feel the switch between being her and being one of them, and thought about the zombie films that Tommy had liked so much, and the online discussions he’d entered into, arguing the case for running zombies. They’re hunters! he’d tell her, and she’d shake her head and mutter something about him being an overgrown kid.

Jayne kept her stare fixed on Tommy’s body, ignoring the other movements she saw in her peripheral vision, and plucked her mobile from her jeans pocket. As she tapped in 911, she wondered how the hell she could make whoever answered believe her when she did not yet believe this madness herself.

Her vision darkened and she felt a familiar faint coming on. Not now not now. . But she drifted away, and when she opened her eyes again an unknown length of time had passed. The sky was darker, the mountains above her lit by weakening evening sunlight, and three people were milling around the cars in front of her. All of them were shredded things, though none of the blood looked fresh. She thought they were checking the cars. Her vision swam once more and she rested her arm across her chest, bite on display, as the churu sucked her down again. .

In dreams there were dead fingers massaging her awake, leaving trails of slick, rotting blood across her hips.

She woke again, jerking upright and crying out as the pain scorched in from her stiff joints. Tears came and blurred her vision, and she wiped her eyes with her arm, forgetting the wound. It was red-raw and still trickling blood, and perhaps that was good. Cleaning the wound, she thought, so that I don’t change and start doing what those things were doing. And then she saw the little girl standing in front of the car.

Jayne gasped and sat up straighter. It was dusk now, maybe an hour since it had happened. Tommy was a shadow on the ground, and there was no sign of the three wandering people she’d seen before. They must have looked in on me. Maybe one, maybe all three, and did they stand there and stare as I slept?

The little girl wore her hair in a ponytail.

‘Poor kid,’ Jayne whispered, and her illness dragged her down once more into unconsciousness. Her cousin Jill called her across a stretch of water turned red with blood, reaching out but unable to touch. I was coming to see you, she said to Jill, but I stopped and found peace with Tommy, and Jill smiled in understanding and waved her urgently across the water. But I can’t, it’s dirty, I’m clean, and if I step in I might. .

But Jill shook her head. She beckoned to Jayne, and-

— when she woke up her feet were kicking in the footwell, her arms thrashing at the seat, and she was trying to swim. She shouted out again in pain, crying herself fully awake. Her head thumped with the remnants of unconsciousness.

Jayne gasped and took several long, deep breaths. No one and nothing moved around her. Tommy was still there, and the little dead girl had gone. Across the car park lay another body, its face turned away from her. Breathing hard, afraid of another blackout, she searched for her mobile phone. When she found it she dialled 911 again.

Sorry, all our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.

‘What the fuck?’ Jayne muttered. She dialled again and got the same message. And again. Then she dialled Ellie’s landline and got her answerphone:

‘Hey, Ellie here, I’ve pissed off to my folks in Kentucky. No way I’m hanging around for this shit.’

Jayne cancelled the call, shaking her head and terrified of the falling darkness, dialled 911 one more time — and a woman answered.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m. . something’s happened to. .’ Jayne said, and the tears came. ‘Tommy.’

‘We’ll have someone with you soon.’ And the woman hung up.

Didn’t even ask my name or where I was. Jayne stared at the phone, expecting the woman to ring back, willing help to come and someone to tell her everything was going to be all right. But the phone remained silent.

She started the car and eased forward, pausing beside Tommy’s body. Shadows lurked beneath and around the other abandoned vehicles, cast there by the setting sun. Maybe the infected ones were watching with their empty eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Tommy,’ Jayne whispered. She tried to remember the last thing she’d heard him say, and the final words she’d said to him.

As she pulled away from the car park she turned on the radio, and soon she realised why all those operators were busy.

8

Jonah had to shoot four more of the afflicted in the head. Sometimes he downed them with the first shot, other times it went wide or struck their chest or neck, and he’d have to nerve himself to shoot again. Each time he pulled the trigger he closed his eyes.

On his laptop he’d worked his way through the facility, opening and closing doors using automatic controls, luring the dead things this way and that until he could lock them away. There were five in the big walk-in fridge in the canteen, three in the services plant room, and two in the gym. The last of the four — those who had surprised him, or who had not gone the way he’d hoped where doors opened or closed — had dashed at him from a bathroom he’d believed to be locked down, and his instinct saved him. He was sure that if he’d had time to think about what was happening, realise what he was doing, then he would have missed. One of them was Ashleigh — she had been an archivist responsible for the storage and duplication of all Coldbrook’s records — and he had shot her in the eye.

Jonah dragged each body to the accommodation room nearest to where he’d shot them, and locked them inside.

He’d been keeping a count of each one he’d locked away or put down. He was up to eighteen. With Holly and Vic gone, that left nine people unaccounted for. Some had escaped up the ventilation duct — he knew that for sure — but he had no idea how many. Not nine, he hoped. And yet the fewer that had made it up there, the more remained down here with him.

No one had emerged at the sounds of gunfire and made themselves known. The hope persisted that some were hiding themselves away, and there were still those three closed doors in an accommodation wing. He had passed them by, and perhaps soon he would think about opening them. Perhaps.

Because Jonah thought he might have gone insane. What if I’m doing this for real? he’d thought as he stalked corridors and shot down shadows. What if I’ve lost my marbles, and picked up a gun, and tomorrow I’ll be an item on the news, just another gun massacre that would fade into obscurity for all but those affected? Madness had been an intriguing idea, and every time he pulled the trigger and opened his eyes again, he’d look carefully for any change in the zombies’ faces, any glimpse that there was terror hiding behind the facades he had brought into being. But the empty eyes persisted, and when those afflicted were put down the only change was that the eyes no longer moved.

The change he did notice was purely physical — the brains remained wet. While the blood from their non-cranial wounds soon coagulated, tacky and drying, the mess blown from their skulls was still rich with blood. This made no sense if their hearts stopped, but Jonah supposed that blood might sit in the brain for a while, kept fresh and heavy with infection, and the drive to spread the disease lived with it. The infection