said that the boys had been using them against the zombies. They joined Thomas and his family, sitting in the truck’s bed.
A car, eight bikers from a gang called Unblessed, a bus with several adults and twenty kids, more walkers. They found some of them stationary, parked on or just off the road and waiting for something that would never come — or fearing something that would. They passed others going in the opposite direction and flagged them down; some stopped, some stepped on the gas.
And Vic began to feel that this was something good. Once inside Coldbrook they’d be somewhere easy to defend, and from there Marc could start his development of a vaccine or cure. With luck the food and water would last.
As they advanced towards Coldbrook and the convoy grew they saw more and more movement in the hills. Several times they passed zombies stationary by the roadside, and with the vehicle’s windows down they could hear their haunting calls. They did not stop.
They moved south-west, parallel to Route 81 but sticking to minor roads. There was a general agreement that to hit the highways would be a bad idea. And, as the afternoon wore on, Vic gained a sense of their wider surroundings and the stories unfolding around them. The people they picked up either lived close by or had fled to the mountains from surrounding cities and towns, believing that the wilds might be safer. Most of them told tales that proved this was not the case. Many had lost family — brothers, parents, wives, children — and they wore the haunted, often hopeless expressions of refugees.
Vic knew that the zombies could not follow on foot, but the larger the convoy of survivors grew, the more he came to fear that news of their existence was being broadcast. The few times they stopped, he climbed from the car and heard a gentle hooting in the distance. It might have been a breeze in the hills.
But he thought not.
7
Holly checked every CCTV camera that was still working at least three times, until she knew that she could wait no longer. A strange, heavy numbness had spread around her side, and she wondered whether she was bleeding internally. She balanced the danger of making her way to the garage against staying put, and opened the door.
She was fairly certain that there were at least three furies loose in Coldbrook’s corridors.
She worked her way slowly from Secondary, down the staircase, and towards the common room and garage beyond. Vic and the others could easily get down into Coldbrook, but that single parked vehicle crushed against the door was a problem. And a bleeding Holly offered the only chance that it could be moved. The weight of responsibility pressed down on her even as the pain spread and numbed her, and she felt a strange dislocation from her body.
A figure shambled around a corner ahead of her. One side of his face was black with dried blood. On seeing her he ran, uttering that mournful noise, alerting any other furies in earshot.
Holly leaned against the wall and raised her pistol. She fired and the bullet punched the fury in the chest. He jarred to a halt, and in that moment when he was motionless she aimed again and shot him in the face. He went down, rolled onto his side with his face against the wall, then grew still.
Her hearing dulled, breathing hard, Holly forced herself on. She kept the gun aimed at the motionless fury, not knowing whether they could feign death, not knowing even now whether they had the will to deceive. She realised that she must have known him when he’d been alive, but she didn’t think too hard about that. He had died almost a week ago, and now she had put him out of his misery.
A wave of dizziness caused her to slump towards the floor. She railed against it, bit her tongue, pressed the hot gun barrel against her cheek. But the numbness seemed to spread from her wounded hip and up through her chest and neck, distancing her senses and luring her towards darkness.
And though she knew that peaceful eternity was waiting for her in Heaven, now she wanted only life.
‘Fuck it!’ she shouted, clearing her senses with an outburst of rage. In the distance, from a direction distorted by echoes, she heard first one short hoot, and then another, both of them drawing closer.
It didn’t matter. She had the gun, and there was only one possible outcome.
It was so ridiculous that she might have laughed.
Left arm pressed across her stomach, her hand clasping the temporary dressing tighter to her right side, Holly started along the corridor again. She knew the complex well, not only the passageways and rooms but those spaces between and behind them where cable routes and plant rooms linked the facility together.
That was how she would beat the furies. Two left, but with her senses fading in and out she could not risk simply charging ahead blind. She had to balance speed with caution.
As she moved, something bothered her. A mistake. An idea that she had left herself open to danger. But she did not dwell too heavily on it, because that would divert her concentration.
Coldbrook was abandoned and run-down, and all but silent. There were only her footsteps, shuffled sounds whispering along a corridor stained with dried blood, scattered with items discarded in panic, the walls pocked with bullet holes here and there. And then there were the bodies.
They stank. The smell filled her nose. She tried breathing through her mouth, but that made it worse.
Pausing at the door of the common room, Holly held her breath and listened.
No footsteps. Nothing moved. Coldbrook’s lighting hummed softly, and deeper down was the constant presence of the core, a sensation more than a noise, betraying itself through the fabric of the place as it had ever since it had first been initiated many years ago.
As she reached for the door, her satphone rang.
‘Shit!’ Startled, she pulled her hand from her wound to go for the phone. Blood had dried against her hand and she ripped part of the padded trouser leg and tied dress away. The pain stabbed through her, and she dropped the gun.
Something banged against the other side of the door. It struck again and again, the lever handle flipping down and up, down and up. The fury was struggling to open the door, some fragmentary memory telling it what to do. Holly stooped for the gun, and then pitched forward as a fainting spell washed over her.
‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ she shouted — pure rage, pure hopelessness, the most defined and lucid moment of her life so close to its end.
The door banged against the wall. Footsteps. She rolled towards the sound and screamed, but the thing stayed silent. The fury tripped over her and struck the ground head first, thrashing like a landed fish for a few seconds as Holly scrambled aside, kicking against it, pushing against the floor until she sat against the wall and the gun was by her side. She grabbed it up and held it in both hands, and then the fury turned to face her.
Sugg. Their chef. A calm, quiet man, he’d spent most of his spare time birdwatching in the mountains above them. Now he looked relatively untouched apart from a terrible bite on his left hand. But Holly knew there was nothing at all human about him, and she shot him in the neck. He fell back, lifted himself again, and she fired into his head. This time he lay still.
Panting as she tried to retain consciousness, Holly realised that the satphone was still ringing in her pocket. ‘Oh Vic, for fuck’s sake,’ she breathed. As she plucked out the phone she heard several sets of running footsteps.
Moira must have released more than three furies.
Holly propped the phone between her knees and aimed along the corridor, back the way she had come.
