Coldbrook

Jayne felt the churu coma circling her again. She tried to defy it, emitting a low, quiet moan as she struggled against the dark.

Someone took her hand, surprising her so much that she opened her eyes and sat up straighter. Pain roared through her, but she was used to it. She had lived with it for ever. She let it flood through her eyes and thud in her ears, and Olivia’s hand around hers, her smile, suddenly made things easier.

They passed around a low outcropping in the hillside. The road curved down into the valley, and there was the small compound that might be their new home. Its area was perhaps two acres and it had a few buildings, some informal gardens, parking areas, and a low level of security — fence planted with hedging to disguise it, single guardhouse at the gate. From this distance the bodies that the biker had mentioned were specks, the Chinooks toys.

‘That’s it?’ Jayne asked.

‘Iceberg,’ Lucy said. ‘Lots more below than above. Main entrance is that big grey concrete building, and a road circles down from there into the garage area. But we’re heading for one of the ventilation ducts.’

‘Why?’

‘Only way in. When it hit, Jonah locked down the whole place.’

‘Okay back there?’ Sean asked as he drove.

‘Yeah,’ Jayne said. ‘For now. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to walk.’

‘I could carry you,’ Olivia said. ‘Daddy says I’m the strongest girl in the world.’

‘He might well be right, kid.’ Jayne grinned, feeling herself pressed into the darkness. ‘Oh,’ she said, and her voice sounded very far away. Even the gunshot she heard could have been in another world. And then everything fell silent, still.

. . carry her. .

The voice was incredibly distant, echoed with the soft snap of gunshots.

. . go down first, I’ll follow, have to tie her on in case. .

Jayne raged against the churu and opened her eyes. She was sitting on the station wagon’s hood, Sean standing close to her with his back turned, and he was looking back over his shoulder.

‘Hey, Jayne,’ he said softly. ‘Marc is tying you to me, and I’ll carry you down.’

‘We’re here?’ She looked around at Coldbrook’s compound, and saw that close-up there were many more signs of everything that had gone wrong. Bullet holes pocked the buildings, windows had been blown out, and she could see three bodies. They were horribly mutilated, and wild animals had been at them. One of them had been torn open and its innards spread around. At least they didn’t move.

Past a low building, a length of the boundary fence and hedging was scorched and twisted, and beyond lay the gutted remains of a Chinook, its rotors slumped and its fuselage burned away.

Jayne leaned against Sean and rested her head on his shoulder, looking back the way they had come. Two of the trucks had been parked side by side across the gateway. She frowned.

‘Wasn’t there a Ford?’

‘That one didn’t make it.’

Zombies were running along the road that curved down the hillside and was obscured here and there by trees. The first few had already reached the low, hedged fence, and the Unblessed guys were walking calmly back and forth, shooting them as they started to climb. But there were many, many more.

‘The bus. .’ Jayne said, and then darkness took her again. She threw her arms around Sean’s chest and sobbed again when she felt his hands close around hers.

‘Back with us?’ Sean asked. His voice sounded different: echoing, yet deadened. ‘Don’t struggle. I’m climbing down the duct with you, but the ladder’s narrow. It’s dark. Only two torches. So just trust me, and-’

‘Of course I trust you,’ Jayne said. Rope rubbed the skin of her back raw, but it was a different pain from that of the churu and she clung to it. It was the pain of damage, not the agony she had lived with for so long. And when she felt a dribble of blood running down her side, she traced its journey, fascinated.

From above came the muffled sound of gunshots.

‘How long. .?’ she asked, her voice slurred.

‘We have to be quick,’ Sean said.

They descended further, and then there were more gunshots, this time from below. Sean stopped and leaned slightly out from the ladder, aiming a torch downward, and when Jayne looked she saw a deep, dark metallic throat maybe five feet across. The torch’s beam shook, and she could feel Sean’s sweat soaking through to her.

A head appeared below them, and she gasped. It’ll look up and see me, and know me, and then it’ll hoot and they’ll know where we are, and-

‘Is it clear?’ Sean asked.

‘Is now,’ the man said, looking up. It was Thomas, the guy they’d picked up at the roadblock.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. One of them, hanging on to the ladder. And. .’

‘And?’ Sean asked. ‘For fuck’s sake, and?’

‘And there are people down here with bows and arrows.’

Bows and arrows, Jayne thought. She closed her eyes and rested her head against Sean’s damp back.

‘We’re not out of the woods yet.’ He started climbing down again, and she could feel him shaking.

13

The pressure of memories was just as great, but none of them were Jonah’s own. He saw people he had never known, places he had never been, and the images gave the impression of being from some forgotten film discovered in an attic fifty years after it had been shot — scratchy, distant. Everyone he was looking at was dead, that was the only certainty. These were memories from other people and different worlds, and he wondered whether his visions would grow stranger and more remote the further he journeyed from home.

This string of universes, Jonah thought. It was a phrase that Bill Coldbrook had used to use. He’d imagined an endless thread tied in complex knots and wrapped in infinitely tight balls, each universe at a point along the string, every one overlapping every other. But perhaps there was a more regimented structure to reality, an order to the multiverse that could be called geography, one which followed that string. If I went on, and on, and on for ever, what worlds might I find?

He wondered if the Inquisitors would go on for ever. He shivered. And then he emerged from the breach, and what he saw was beautiful.

The landscape reminded him so much of the valleys and mountains around his own Coldbrook. The black breach behind him was nestled at the junction of two ridges on a shallow hillside. Beyond that, everywhere was wooded. The heart of the Appalachians was like this, a wild place, home to hard people and to animals that had never laid eyes on a human being. Jonah drew a deep breath and wondered what kind of life dwelled here.

There was no sign of anything man-made — no buildings, aircraft contrails, or straight lines — and it struck him that the breaches on each Earth were in remote places, beyond where humanity might have been aware of them even if those Earths had still been thriving. Breaches were evidence of a radical, daring science that the scientists had been keen to hide from view.

He started to walk, aiming downhill because that route was simpler, and soon he was swallowed by the forest.

I have almost seen enough, Jonah thought. Almost.

The trees were tall and healthy, mostly spruce and balsam fir mixed in with larger hardwoods, and the forest floor was home to swathes of bramble, blueberry and rhododendron shrubs. A heavier yellow fruit that he did not recognise hung in bunches from a broad-leafed plant, and for a moment he worried about trying it. Then he laughed and plucked one, popping it between his teeth and sighing at the warm sweetness.

Small blue birds flashed between tree boles, and from somewhere higher up Jonah could hear the cry of a hawk. Sugg could tell me if that was a goshawk or a red-tail, he thought. But Coldbrook’s chef was an incomprehensible distance from him now, and probably dead.