Coldbrook

‘You don’t sound French,’ Vic said after a pause. The man intimidated the hell out of him, but he wanted to present some attitude, stand his ground. He was doing enough beating himself up as it was, without taking it from someone else as well.

‘Mother was from Quebec.’ Marc reached over and tapped the screen. ‘Now look. You got some catching up to do.’

Vic looked. The page was laid out in thumbnails, each with a brief description underneath. He clicked on the first, and watched.

Over the next fifteen minutes, while Marc drove and smoked silently and Lucy followed on behind, Vic watched a selection of videos that displayed just how bad things had become. They seemed to have been taken from many sources: hand-held hi-def video cameras; mobile-phone footage; images taken from press sites and news programmes; aerial views, probably from police or military choppers; and several videos that looked as though they’d been taken by a soldier’s gun- or helmet-mounted camera.

‘What is this site?’ Vic asked halfway through. He’d just watched a group of raging, blood-soaked people swept from a roadway by a huge truck with a cattle guard on the front, and then a dozen men machine-gunning them in a ditch. The camera shook as the shooting took place, and turned away when the first of the men lobbed in a grenade.

‘Military site a friend of mine gave me access to,’ Marc said. ‘There’s been some rapid response, as you can see. But the scope of this thing is huge. It’s spreading like ripples in a pond, except that they’re getting bigger and faster. It’s hit beyond Charlotte in the east, Atlanta in the south, and there are even reports from Nashville.’

‘All in a day,’ Vic said.

‘Yeah. A day.’

‘But we’re fighting back, right? The government? The military?’

Marc looked at him, another of those long stares that suggested he’d forgotten that he was driving.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But what do they think they’re fighting? No one believes in zombies.’

‘I don’t know-’

‘Think about it,’ Marc said, cutting him off again. ‘You’ve been listening to the radio. Heard the panic. The religious nuts saying this is the end, God’s will, Armageddon. The jokers suggesting that media panic is overblowing everything, it’s nothing but a bunch of fucking smacked-up college kids copying each other, japes and jokes on the scale of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast. And the official statements tell us less than the radio jocks and the screamed eyewitness accounts recorded by ambulance-chasing reporting teams. Then there’re the fucking experts, names pulled off the shelves by radio and TV stations to be talking heads while the news guys go and have their make-up touched up. And none of these fuckers have a clue. Because they don’t have an open mind.’

‘But the army,’ Vic said. ‘The government.’

‘Yeah, there’s been shooting and Chinooks flying around. Who knows, they might have some fancy new crap which they can finally get to try out on some moving targets. You know Bill Hicks?’

‘No,’ Vic said.

‘Pull up G-Twelve!’ Marc chuckled, lit another cigar-ette and inhaled, and Vic went to open a window. But he thought better of it.

‘But the spread,’ Vic said. ‘That’s your field, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve never, ever seen anything spreading as fast as this. It’s almost word-of-mouth speed, and that’s unstoppable by force. So we’ve got two hopes, and neither of them involves bullets and bombs. First, this thing dies out of its own accord. Whatever the contagion is — and others are working on that — it’s come from somewhere else. That place you and Jonah reached. Maybe. .’ He waved his hand, as if to pluck an idea from the air, and chuckled again. ‘The ghost of H. G. Wells will save us, and the cold virus will wipe this thing out.’ He took another long drag on the cigarette.

‘And the other possibility is a cure.’

‘Right. And that’s where I come in.’

‘And me?’

‘You?’ Marc said, glancing sidelong at Vic. ‘Jonah tells me you have a good mind. Sharp. A clear way of lateral thinking. Considering he thinks you’re a shit, he talked you up pretty good. So, you’re my gofer. I tell you jump, you jump.’

‘Great,’ Vic said, and he looked down at the iPad again, opening another file. Something was niggling at him. Something he’d seen, but not registered.

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old. ‘And when it’s all over and we’ve saved the world, then I get to kill you.’

4

Jonah stood with the gun in his hand and looked down at his dead friend.

Satpal lay in a sticky puddle of his own blood. Also in the puddle, curled from the moisture, was a photograph of his family back in India. Jonah knew that he visited them at least twice each year, and that they were proud of him.

The first two closed doors on the accommodation corridor had revealed nothing. He’d opened them slowly, carefully, with the gun at the ready, expecting the silence to be shattered with violence. But both rooms were empty, neat and tidy. Whoever had lived in them was dead somewhere else.

Maybe if I’d come down here earlier I could have saved him. Satpal had locked his door from the inside and then cut his wrists with a pocket knife. The wounds looked rough, torn rather than sliced, as if the knife was blunt. It lay close to the photograph.

The blood reflected the ceiling light, and the dead man looked too still. In Coldbrook’s sterile environment there were no flies, few insects, and Satpal was destined to rot alone.

Jonah closed the door and locked it again, using his universal key. ‘I really am on my own,’ he said, leaning his head against the door frame — and then someone walked past the end of the corridor.

Jonah raised the gun and took a few steps back, gasping, his heart stuttering and then racing again. The shadow flitted away, cast by the ceiling lights in the corridor perpendicular to the one he was in. He could tell nothing of the shadow’s shape or origin, but he heard no footsteps, no breathing.

There was only one way out from the corridor. Trying to breathe softly and evenly, Jonah started forward. Twenty feet until the junction, fifteen, and still he could neither hear nor see anything. Dried blood smeared the floor, and there was a shoe propped against the wall. It was white and pristine.

He clasped the gun in both hands, waiting for the shadow to flit back again and whatever had cast it to emerge. Someone else alive, but it was a vain hope.

This time there was no shadow. The figure walked around the corner and came towards Jonah, his swollen eyes and spiky hair glistening, the protruding mouth gasping out small clouds of moisture, and in his right hand was the organ-like object with a dozen tendrils tasting the air.

Jonah’s breath caught in his throat, and he tried to perceive any kind of humanity in this man. But other than his shape, and number of limbs, and gait, there was none.

Jonah’s hands shook — this nightmare was so real, the fear he felt so deep and thick, his heart skipping, breath punched from his lungs with shock-

This time I’m not asleep. As the organ-object kissed Jonah’s head, his finger squeezed the trigger and-

— the explosion rips through the heart of the ship, erupting from its upper decks and tearing a hole in its hull. Fire and smoke gush out and, as seawater roars into the gap, steam billows in great clouds. They catch the sun and throw rainbows across the terrible scene.

The people with him in the lifeboat cry out in grief and terror. The impact thuds into the small boat, conveyed through the water, and several seams break. Some start bailing, while those sitting on the three cross-braces start to row.

He tries to speak, reaches out to touch, but he is not there. All to die, a voice says,