Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  But that was something for Jonah to decide. And it was nowhere near as easy as simply closing a door.

  “Looks clear,” Holly said, and when she looked up Alex was already moving forward. The other three guards covered him. He shouldered his gun and stepped into the puddle of blood. His boots made a slight splash in the congealing fluid and sluggish blood flowed in to fill his footprints. He edged around the dead man and skirted Melinda’s head, approaching from the other side, checking his men’s field of fire and squatting beside her.

  Melinda groaned.

  “She’s alive!” Holly said. “She’s alive?” She spun around and looked up at Jonah, already seeing the hopelessness in his expression. He’ll still have to leave us in here, she thought.

  “But she can’t be…” Satpal said. And Holly turned around again, because something about his voice seemed so sure.

  Alex was still squatting beside Melinda, both hands held out as if unsure if or where he should touch her. She was moving slightly, groaning, limbs flexing, and when her face turned towards Holly she realised what Satpal had meant. She was all raw meat and teeth.

  “Get me some dressings!” Alex snapped. One of his men dashed to the guard station by the main door.

  “Is it just—?” Satpal said, and then Melinda sat up.

  “Just what?” Holly asked.

  A soft, ghostly sound filled the room, like a breeze blowing through weathered rocks.

  Alex was looking at the biologist in amazement. He was still holding his hands out to either side, not wanting to touch her anywhere, when she grabbed his head, pulled it towards her face—and bit him.

  5

  Vic Pearson dreams of his dead sister. It is the worst kind of nightmare, one where he knows what is to come but cannot wake up or change its course. And in the waking hours to follow, he will think that quite appropriate. Charlotte’s real life had gone the same way, with him as a passive but supportive observer, unable to nudge her from the track of self-destruction that had finally taken her from him. He’d loved her and hated her, but in the nightmare she terrifies him.

  Charlotte died at nineteen, but in the dream she, like Vic, is in her forties. She has hair greying at the temples and a face pinched by her troubled life. Stone-cross gravestones have been tattooed onto her forearms by blunt, infected needles, and he follows her through their Boston suburb as she goes from house to house, gathering the paraphernalia of her demise from people who should know better. At one house their mother opens the door and hands Charlotte a family heirloom to sell for drugs, and as Charlotte walks away without saying thank you Vic rages at his mother, shouting. But he has no voice—she does not hear. She averts her eyes and closes the front door on the smell of baking and despair. At the next house, Charlotte’s teenaged school friend answers the door and starts nodding, agreeing with every mad thing that Charlotte says. Satisfied, she walks on to the next house, and the next, and each time Vic tries to plead with the person who answers the door to make a stand against his sister’s downward spiral.

  He knows what is coming and whose the last house will be, but it is still a surprise when he spies the toys scattered across the lawn and his own car in the driveway. It’s a house that he has never lived in, but which feels more like home than the Danton Rock bungalow he has shared with Lucy since their marriage.

  This is the only part of the nightmare where he actually hears the words being spoken.

  Lucy answers the door when Charlotte knocks.

  “Charlotte! You’re looking well. Death becomes you.”

  “Hi, Luce. My loser brother at home?”

  Loser! Vic thinks. She dares call me a loser! He hears Olivia’s sweet girly voice from inside the house, and he starts to loathe himself as his hatred grows for his sister, dead for over two decades but alive and ageing along with him right now, because of the sense of dreadful loss she’s instilled within him. When she died he felt the guilt resting squarely on his shoulders, and though he’d seen the same responsibility crushing his parents and her friends as well, he’d never been able to shake it. His unrelenting and almost painful love for his wife and daughter is fed partly by that guilt, and partly by the hopeless loss he still feels for Charlotte.

  And the dream turns to nightmare.

  “Vic’s not in right now,” Lucy says. “He’s at work.”

  “Right, yeah. At work.” Charlotte leans against the wall and rubs a powder into her gums and stabs her forearm with a hypodermic that instantly vanishes. “He’s fucking Holly Wright, you know. Any chance they get. They’re down there for days on end sometimes, and she likes him to eat her out in her shower cubicle. She sucked him off in the canteen’s kitchen once. She doesn’t like to swallow, but she takes it over her tits.”

  “Vic’s not in right now,” Lucy says again, apparently not hearing.

  “He says he loves her,” Charlotte says, and her skin starts changing, hanging slack from her frame as death catches up with her. She turns and acknowledges him for the first time. “When we were kids he said he loved me, too.”

  I did, Vic screams, but no sound emerges. And then to feed his guilt comes Charlotte’s denial of what he is trying to say. She opens her mouth and starts screeching at him, an intermittent cry that raises the hairs on the back of his arms and neck and makes his balls quiver, just as thoughts of Holly used to. They sometimes still did.

  Lucy smiles uncertainly at the terrifying sound, glancing around her front lawn, not seeing Vic but carrying in her eyes a suspicion that he has spent years trying not to see for real.

  Vic snapped awake and sat up in his small room. He sighed, wiped a hand across his face, and fell out of bed. He looked around for Charlotte, but she was only ever in his dreams. The sound was something else. The sound was—

  ““Fuck me, it’s the alarm.” He stood and tried to shake the last remnants of the nightmare, knowing from experience that it would haunt his mood and mind all day. The nearest sounder was at the corridor junction a dozen steps away, but the sound was designed to penetrate every corner of Coldbrook. Already he could hear running feet outside. They’d rehearsed for this; it was one of the safeguards that Jonah insisted upon. What they’d never designed was any method of communicating just what the emergency was.

  He looked around his small room. It was a stopover place, because his main home was up in Danton Rock with Lucy and Olivia. They had always been the most important things in his life, despite what Charlotte might have to say, and he’d die or kill to protect them. If necessary, both.

  He groaned, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shake off sleep. Dream and reality were still bleeding together, the nightmare tenacious, so much so that he expected to see Charlotte in front of him when he opened his door. But out in the corridor a technician ran by, dressed in boxers and boots and a scruffy Motörhead T-shirt.

  “Andy! What’s up?”

  He skidded to a stop past Vic’s door and looked back. “Dunno. Alarm woke me so I’m off to my station.”

  “Yeah,” Vic said, and Andy turned and hurried on. Off to my station. They all knew what to do should the alarm sound. It had been drummed into them enough.

  Vic slipped back into his room and closed the door, searching through the mess of clothes on the floor for his satphone. He was one of several in the facility who kept them on their person at all times—him, Jonah, Holly, the guards’ captain Alex—and it was also a direct link to outside. His priority now was to find out what had gone wrong, and then decide what he should do about it. Gotta get to my station in Secondary, he thought. That was what procedure said—the alarm would initiate Control lockdown, and Secondary should be his aim. But that was not what his heart said, and never had been. He’d always promised himself that if things went badly wrong down here, his family would come first.

  He dialled Holly but received an unavailable signal. What the fuck…? He cancelled, and dialled Jonah. It was answered in three rings.

  “Vic… something came through.” The ol
d man sounded breathless and panicked, and Vic had to close his eyes for a moment, sick at the knowledge that this was not a false alarm. He’d always had his doubts and fears, but even then he hadn’t really believed that something would go wrong. Not really.

  “Jonah, what was it? Where are you? Where’s Holly? I can’t reach her.”

  “I’m going for Secondary. Control’s locked down.” He panted, running as he spoke. “Something came through.”

  “What came through?” Vic asked again, cursing the continuing alarm that stole some of his words.

  “Don’t know… a creature, but…” Gasping, coughing.

  “Where’s Holly?”

  “Control.” Vic stared at the narrow cot where he and Holly had made love so many times, felt her breath on his neck and her fists squeezing his shoulders as she came, and his sister’s voice echoed from his dream. Right, yeah. At work.

  “How did something get past the—?”

  “Vic, it attacked Melinda.”

  “What? How?”

  “Bit her. Bad. But then she… I thought she was dead, but she…”

  “Jonah?”

  “Need to control this until we can…” He was panting harder now, each breath a gasp. “…can figure out…”

  “Is Holly safe?”

  “Don’t know. Meet me in Secondary.”

  “Okay.” And before he could say anything else Jonah signed off. Vic stared at the satphone for a few seconds as if expecting it to buzz into life again.

  He snapped up his palmtop computer, patched into the wireless network and then accessed the facility’s remote cameras. It took two attempts to enter the correct password, and for a panicked moment he feared that some security-conscious employee had changed it. But then the thumbnail images sprang up, and he scrolled across to Control.

  Even before maximising the image, he could see how bad it was.

  Control was in chaos. Someone was shooting, the gunfire somehow seeming even more violent without sound. Blood was splashed across the floor, pooled around a prone shape.

  Vic gasped, looked for Holly, brought the palmtop closer to his face. But he couldn’t make anyone out.

  “Fuck. Fuck.” Something came through and Vic couldn’t see what that something might be. Whatever it was, it had brought death.

  Shaking, he dropped the palmtop face-down on the bed and dialled the first few numbers of his home landline. He paused, cancelled. It was four a.m. If he told Lucy that something was wrong, she might panic and let it slip to someone else. And he needed his family exactly where they were.

  He paced his room, uncertain, clasping the phone, glancing again at the palmtop. Something came through, something attacked, and Holly was somewhere in there. His family would be asleep, Lucy lonely in the marital bed he had betrayed so much. His long-dead sister was right, he had told Holly that he loved her. But it was an illicit love, passion-driven, and nothing compared to what he felt for his family.

  Vic was shaking.

  As he blinked, he saw Lucy’s expression in his dream as Charlotte spewed out the sordid truth. The suspicion that existed in nightmare, and which perhaps he’d spied several times in the years since the affair had ended.

  In the echo of Jonah’s gasping, panicked words, duty called. But Vic could only heed a far greater duty.

  Panting, he dragged the gun box from beneath his bed and clicked though the numbers on the coded lock. The M1911 pistol went into his belt, along with three extra magazines. He hadn’t fired it for almost a year, when he’d hiked to a range high in the Appalachians to see how stale his shooting had become. He’d still been pretty good. Holding the pistol, feeling the rough grip, smelling the gun oil: it felt like a statement of intent.

  The siren screeched again and again, and it could only be turned off from Control or Secondary. Jonah hadn’t reached Secondary yet, though it must only be a matter of seconds. And in Control, perhaps they were too busy.

  “Holly,” he said out loud, and he thought back to the last time he’d spoken her name in this room. She hadn’t been here since the evening they ended their affair, when they’d sat together for half a night and had drunk three bottles of wine. Holly, you’re too special for me to lose, he’d said, and if we carry on I will lose you.

  But your family are more special, she’d said. And she understood fully, she really did. That was why he still loved her. The sex was no longer there, but the friendship was priceless. Vic hoped that, if she was still alive, she would understand what he had to do now.

  He had to abandon her.

  “Control’s locked down, can’t get in anyway,” he whispered, justifying this new betrayal, thinking of the silent image of blood and shooting. “Whatever came through is trapped.” And despite trying to convince himself that was true, his need to get his family as far away from here as possible was so pressing that it made him dizzy. Because he had always been afraid that something terrible might happen, and there was no telling what had just been released.

  Vic left his room and slammed the door. At the junction, he looked left at where the corridor curved around towards the staircase leading down to Control and up to Secondary, and right at where it dog-legged away from the core and towards the common room and garage. He hesitated for only a second, and then turned right.

  With every step he ran further from his professional responsibilities and the alarm screamed at his betrayal.

  6

  Alex shot Melinda five times. She fell back still biting, and the guard captain yelled as her teeth tugged away part of his face. She flipped onto her back and writhed for a second, bloody hands shoving at the motionless intruder from beyond the breach, and Holly thought, That’s it, she’s dead now, I’m sure I saw her spine—

  Melinda sat up again, pushing with one hand and seemingly unaware of her new, terrible wounds.

  “Alex!” Holly shouted, as if the captain would need warning about this pitiful, bloody wreck. But Alex was leaning back on his knees with a terrible, disbelieving look on his face. One hand still aimed the pistol at Melinda, the other was pressed against his cheek and jaw where she’d bitten him. He leaned further back, legs bent almost in half at the knee now, head almost touching the floor, and the gun made a metallic tink as it dropped from his hand. He grew still.

  “Sir!” another guard said, moving closer.

  “Back,” Satpal said. “Stay back! Can’t you see…?”

  “See fucking what?” Holly said, and then the cosmologist was at her side. She could smell the sweat on him, the fear. She wondered if she smelled the same.

  “She can’t be getting up,” he said softly. And Holly knew that he was right. No one leaks that much blood and lives. No one…

  “Sir!” another guard shouted, the one that Alex had sent away to fetch dressings to tend Melinda’s wounds. He stood close to the breach floor now, staring down at the massive pool of blood and the figures at its centre: the intruder, motionless with most of his head missing; Melinda, sitting up fully now, one arm propping her as she tried to get to her feet; and Alex, hand fallen from his face, horribly contorted and motionless.

  “What the fuck do we do?” another guard said. He was standing ten feet to Holly’s left, pistol aimed at Melinda, his face pale. “Sir, what do we do?” Holly realised that he was directing his questions at Alex.

  The captain suddenly tensed, then raised himself back to a kneeling position. His mouth worked, but only a soft humming sound emerged from it. Holly could see his teeth through the wound in his cheek.

  “Shit,” someone muttered. They could all see that the soldier’s movements were wrong.

  “We’re locked down in here,” Holly said. “Two of you keep watch on the breach in case…” She shook her head. “You.” She nodded at the guard with the field dressings. “What’s your name?”

  “Neil.”

  “Neil, I think Alex is… is in shock.” Alex was on his feet now, swaying forward and backward and looking around the room. There was somethin
g about his eyes… They didn’t look shocked to Holly. They looked different. He looked at her, then at Satpal, then at the three other guards, two of them pointing guns at him. Blood spewed from his face, and Melinda was behind him now, a bloody, meaty mess who should have been…

  “Melinda?” Holly said softly, between a blast of the alarm’s loud siren. But the biologist did not seem to hear, and her previously beautiful face was gone, home now to red.

  Alex hooted softly like a dove, a strangely beautiful sound. Then he ran at Neil, the guard holding the dressings, and Neil didn’t even manage to gasp before his captain shoved him backward onto a step and fell on him.

  “Shoot him!” Satpal screamed, but neither of the other guards moved.

  “Oh dear God, what have we done?” Holly said.

  “I can get us out,” Satpal said, leaning in close to whisper his secret.

  “No. Lockdown.”

  Neil screamed. Alex was biting him, his head thrashing. The other two guards were shouting at each other and at their captain, but still neither of them fired.

  Holly glanced at the breach and the darkness beyond.

  “I can get us out,” Satpal said again. Holly frowned. He snorted, then ran up towards the main doors.

  “We’re in lockdown!” Holly shouted, and someone started shooting. She ducked down beside her desk, not sure where the gunfire was coming from or whether the workstation would shield her or not. The sound was horrendous, smothering the alarm, and she pressed her hands to her ears and cried out. When the shooting ended she looked up the terraced room at Satpal. He was doing something with the door control, sweat patches spreading from beneath his arms and across his back, and she thought, No, Satpal, we can’t let them out. He glanced back, caught her eye and then looked beyond and behind her. His eyes opened wide.

  Holly raised herself and looked across the top of the control panel. Her computer screen had been shattered by a bullet. Past that she saw Melinda, bloody red Melinda, clawing at a guard’s face and chest even as he backed away from her, pulling her with him. He must have dropped his gun because he was now stabbing at her with a short knife, plunging the blade into her back again and again. It had no effect. Holly saw the terror in his eyes, and then the pain as her nails opened him up and her face pressed in to gnaw at the wounds.