Coldbrook

cars crashed together and burning, a group of people on the sidewalk shouting and arguing about whose fault it had been. Turning a corner, heading out of town, she’d passed a long straight row of bars and restaurants, and a crowd had spilled onto the streets, bottles and glasses clasped in their hands, singing, living it up. Tommy’s dead! she’d wanted to shout, but she didn’t think they’d have cared. Perhaps many of them didn’t yet know about the strange attacks and the even stranger consequences, but she suspected that the ones partying hardest did know.

She’d dreaded getting caught in traffic approaching the airport, but there was only a slight hold-up. She’d wondered at that. Had people really not grasped what was happening? But then, she had witnessed things first- hand. Had seen people bitten and shot, run over and killed, only to stand up again and come at her with those empty, animal eyes. Eyes that held the depth of true death. So she supposed that news reports — garbled, confused, and unbelievable as they were — would do little to portray the unbearable truth.

Jayne left the car and locked it, knowing she would never sit in it again. It had been Tommy’s secret pride and joy, an old model that had far fewer electrics to go wrong, and which had gone around the clock already. They could have afforded a newer car, but he liked its styling, its look, and he’d said why dump what’s not broken? She liked that about Tommy. He never really considered material things to be of any real importance.

A passenger jet roared behind the buildings as it powered along the runway for take-off. At least they were still flying. She’d been worried about that. If this had been an outbreak of Ebola or bubonic plague they’d have shut the airports, seaports and state borders. But apparently it would take a lot longer for the authorities to take action over a zombie outbreak.

Jayne gave a bark of laughter that turned into a cry, and then she walked to the airport building.

The departures terminal was busy. There were businessmen reading newspapers or frowning over their BlackBerries, families huddled together with kids excited and worried adults glancing around, and single travellers, many of whom Jayne could not read. She found herself checking them all for injuries, but all she saw was one man with a fleck of blood on his white collar. Shaving cut, she thought, and she had to bite her lip to hold back the hysteria.

The next flight to the UK was in three hours, and she bought one of the last places on it. She used her disabled card to get a comfortable seat, then used it again to be fast-tracked through to the departures lounge. And the whole experience was dreamlike. There were a couple of people crying, and a few who were huddling around the TV in one of the bars, but generally people seemed either unsure of what was happening or appeared not to care.

Jayne spent a few minutes watching the TV, nursing a Jack Daniel’s, more because it had been Tommy’s favourite drink than because she actually wanted it, and she realised then why everything seemed so unreal. Part of it was the fragmentary nature of the reports — there were clips of distant fires, unfocused telephone-camera imagery of shapes rushing through darkness, and helicopter shots of people moving across hillsides. And part of it was the bizarre nature of what they were seeing. Most of the news broadcasts were confused and unclear: unscripted stories, rushed interviews with traumatised and hysterical members of the public, and a few straight- faced officials denying that the emergency services weren’t coping, and assuring viewers that all calls would be dealt with ‘within two minutes’.

But scattered among the confused live broadcasts was more telling footage. One brief clip, expertly and probably secretly shot, showed corpses being unloaded from the back of an ambulance. There were so many that they must have been stacked in layers inside, and when Jayne saw the paramedics’ face masks she gave another harsh laugh, followed by a sob. But no one looked her way. All gazes in the bar were focused on the screen at that point, as the cameraman panned along the row of corpses. Terrible wounds were revealed, injuries that belonged in a war. And every one of the bodies had head trauma.

‘At least someone knows what they’re doing,’ Jayne said, and two young guys on the table next to her glanced her way with shock written all over their faces. She finished her Jack Daniel’s and closed her eyes, feeling the burn.

Human nature meant that it would take a while for all this to sink in.

But it wouldn’t take that long.

Jayne spent two hours in the departures lounge willing the minutes until take-off away, because once they closed the airport that would be it. She’d be stuck here while they — the famous They, the faceless They — tried to take control of things, and reality would surround her. Once in the air and heading for the UK, the sense of the unreality of everything that had happened would increase. There, for a while, perhaps she would find respite.

Her flight was called and she boarded. She was sitting next to a middle-aged businessman whose constant chatter marked him as a nervous flyer. Her monosyllabic responses soon persuaded him to keep his nervousness to himself, and as they went through the pre-flight checks and safety demonstrations Jayne closed her eyes and could almost believe that none of this had happened. But her arm still throbbed, and Tommy stared at her behind her closed eyes, the expression on his face one of surprise as Spartacus’s bullet blew his life away.

They took off, and in the distance Jayne saw a fire blazing somewhere to the north. Fifteen minutes into the flight, an attendant told someone in the seat in front of Jayne that they were the last flight out of Knoxville. From elsewhere she heard someone whisper, ‘Morris says they’re bombing Atlanta.’

3

They drove through the day, hoping to reach Cincinnati by sunset.

After Vic had told Lucy why and how it was his fault, she’d surprised him by softening a little. He could not be sure how either of them could guarantee it, but their spoken determination to stay together had inspired a measure of strength in him that had been lacking before. Instinct had driven him up and out of Coldbrook, but Lucy’s love went some way to driving his guilt back down. He had much to make amends for, but she knew why he had done what he’d done. In her eyes he saw that she understood.

Lucy drove some of the way, but Vic always felt more comfortable driving. And besides, for every mile of their three-hundred-mile journey he was considering roadblocks, state border controls, martial law, public panic, and the rule of chaos. In his pocket he carried his identification card, and in the car door beside his left thigh sat the M1911. If they came across trouble, he wanted to be behind the wheel.

Lucy had spent the first hour of the journey trying to call friends in Danton Rock on her iPhone. Her first couple of calls were answered, and Vic cringed as he heard her telling those at the other end that they should pack and leave immediately. ‘Forget the damn school fayre!’ she said to one of them and to another she whispered, ‘Something’s gone wrong down there and you shouldn’t hang around.’ But then her third call was cut off unexpectedly, and after that the whole cellphone network seemed to go down. She’d tried a dozen more numbers ten times each, including those of her parents and her brother. It was only as the last call connected and a heavy, loaded silence was the only answer to her desperate pleading that she put the phone down.

She’s beginning to understand. This is my fault, Vic thought. But Lucy said nothing more, and she did not try to call Danton Rock again. She said she wanted to save her phone’s battery.

They kept the radio on, turned down low so that Olivia couldn’t hear it. She was happy playing her Nintendo DS, and the chirpy jingles of the Keep a Puppy game provided a surreal theme to the stories they were hearing. As the day wore on and they drew closer to Cincinnati, Lucy moved over in her seat so that she could touch Vic. A hand on his thigh, arm around his shoulders, something that involved physical contact — he took as much comfort from it as she did.

‘You can’t blame yourself,’ she told him as they listened to a report about a huge fire in central Knoxville.

‘I can,’ he said. Lucy squeezed the back of his neck, and from the back seat Olivia started singing.

The radio reports grew in severity, until one channel said they were suspending their Sunday music programming to bring all the updates on the developing situation.

‘What’s a zombie?’ Olivia asked.

Lucy flicked the radio off and glanced at Vic.

‘Just a silly monster from the movies,’ Vic said.

‘No such things as monsters, honey,’ Lucy said.