Coldbrook

‘Fucking hell,’ Marc said. ‘Lucy, he’s fine. Fucking hell.’

‘Couldn’t put it better myself,’ Vic said. He hung there for a moment, not daring to move in case his thundering heart shook him from the ladder. He didn’t deserve to fall after marksmanship like that.

Thirty seconds later he was on the wing, pulling the ladder back up before more of the zombies could climb it. And twenty feet away the emergency door in the fuselage swung open. He crouched down and aimed the gun, and the man who emerged held up his hands, displaying his own gun tucked into his belt.

‘You the sky marshal?’ Vic shouted.

‘Yeah. But who the hell are you?’

‘Wyatt Earp.’ The woman who emerged after the man grinned, glancing up at the hovering helicopter. ‘Wyatt Earp, that’s who he is. Come to restore justice to Zombie Town.’

‘Gotta admit, that was some shooting,’ the sky marshal said.

Vic started shaking. He sat down heavily on the wing before enjoying the contact as the man and woman shook his hand and helped him up. He told them to go first because he had to pull himself together before climbing again. The two men watched the woman’s slow climb, and Vic was aware enough to notice the bandage on her arm.

‘She was really bitten?’ he asked.

‘She was,’ the other man said. ‘Seconds away from getting her brains bashed out by the passengers.’

‘And what happened to them?’

The man heard him but didn’t answer. Neither did his expression change. He watched as the woman reached the top of the ladder and was helped into the helicopter before he spoke again.

‘That’s some girl,’ he said. ‘That really is some girl.’

We’ll see, Vic thought. Then he pointed at the ladder, pleased that his hand was no longer shaking. ‘After you.’

5

They would have tried reaching Jonah by now. If his calls had made waves, then Coldbrook’s surface enclosures would be swarming with military, and they would have worked their way down to him with cutting equipment or explosives.

So it was obvious that there was no one. He was alone down here with no knowledge of what was happening in the world above, and with the Inquisitor getting ready to turn him into one of his own. Ridiculous, and yet Jonah could not rationalise his way out of this understanding. He was being harried by something he could not explain.

Control and the breach chamber were still barricaded with the furniture he had put back outside the compromised door. He started pulling it away, aware all the time of the weight of the gun in his belt. It seemed to do no good against the Inquisitor, but Jonah himself was still human flesh and blood. Alive or dead, he intended to stay that way.

The Inquisitor was behind him, out of sight, somewhere in the darkened facility. He shone his heavy torch back along the corridor, but saw nothing. That only filled him with dread.

You’ll live for ever, the Inquisitor had said, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything worse. These many years without Wendy had been bad enough; eternity without her was unthinkable.

He pulled the last chair away, peered into the room and shone his torch around. Shadows stretched and shifted from behind the many control desks and terminals. Jonah entered Control and almost went to look at the corpse from the other Earth. But he did not have the luxury of time.

‘So there it is,’ he said, standing a dozen steps from the breach as he had so many times since its formation. It was night through there now, and what little of the landscape he could see was heavily shadowed. His heart was thudding, skipping a beat every now and then as it so often did nowadays. He held his hand to his chest. That bastard wanted to open me up.

Holly had punched off the eradicator so that she could escape through, but Jonah had no idea whether it had been set on a time delay. And with power off there was no way to find out. The core, and therefore the breach and its associated containment and eradicator, was self-sustaining, but now impossible to assess.

Something scraped against the floor. He wasn’t sure where the sound had come from or what had caused it, but he held his breath and listened for more. Nothing.

‘Time to get out of here,’ Jonah muttered, drawing the gun from his waistband. He was nowhere near prepared but he could stay no longer.

He strode towards the breach, the threat of being killed by the eradicator a remote concern because he would feel nothing. His body would close down, his mind following soon after, and perhaps he would die thinking of Wendy and everything they had not had time to do together.

As he was about to enter, hair standing on end and body tingling all over, he saw a shadow moving towards him. He raised the gun, heavy and comforting in his hand. Perhaps I’m seeing myself, he thought, because he had no idea what crossing between this world and another might do.

Then the tip of a metal-and-wood device was pointing at him, a shape emerged behind it, and Holly said, ‘You can put can the gun down, Jonah.’

‘Holly!’ he gasped. She stood in the space between two Earths, edging forward, the crossbow pointing at his face. Behind her, only darkness.

‘Jonah?’

He kept his gun trained on her, but he had almost forgotten about it in his surprise.

‘Holly, I. .’

She came forward from the breach, and Jonah could see that so much about her had changed. She was sweating, panting hard, grubby, wearing long shapeless clothes. And her eyes were wide and determined.

‘Gun, Jonah.’

‘Oh.’ He lowered the pistol and smiled, and then Holly’s eyes went wide.

‘I’m not one of-’ he said — and she fired.

HollyshotmeHollyshotme! The bolt flew past the side of his head and he felt a brief draught as it whispered by. Then he heard an impact behind him and a startled exhalation, and as he spun around Holly was shouting, ‘What the fuck was that?’

‘What?’ Jonah felt a momentary queasiness, and the world tilted around him. Holly did not come to help him and he had to lean over and rest his hands on his knees. There was nothing moving in Control apart from a trace of mist.

‘That thing.’

‘There’s nothing-’

‘Weird guy behind you. Gone now.’ Her voice trembled a little, and at first he thought it was from fear. ‘Not one of them?’

‘The Inquisitor?’ Jonah asked, realising that Holly was afraid she’d shot someone else. ‘You saw it?’ But his rush of elation was quickly tempered by Holly’s expression.

‘Inquisitor.’ Holly blinked a few times, shock settling across her face. ‘Jesus help us. The Inquisitor? That’s what you called it?’

‘It’s what it calls itself.’

‘Oh, Jonah, we have so much to talk about.’

‘Through there,’ he said, pointing behind her.

‘No.’ She was loading a fresh bolt into the crossbow.

‘Yes!’ They had to leave here, because the freak had revealed himself to both of them.

‘No, Jonah. No way. They’re close.’ She looked behind her and, though he could see no shadows moving through there, Jonah could see that her fear was very real.

‘Who?’

She pointed her crossbow at the first fury that had come through and started all this. ‘Like that,’ she said.