Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  “If I hadn’t left my phone up there.” He nodded along the aisle.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  They were silent for a while, feeling the strange lifting sensation as the aircraft lost altitude in preparation for landing.

  “What should we do when we’re on the ground?” Jayne asked at last.

  “I’ve been thinking on that,” Sean said. “Mostly up to now I’ve just been acting for the moment. Keeping you safe.” He looked at her, and she wondered how old his daughter was. “And, if you’ll let me, I’d like to continue doing that after we land.”

  Jayne smiled.

  “So once we land, we need to slip away and—”

  The shouting was sudden, and shocking. Some people were speaking, others simply crying out in despair, and Sean knelt beside Jayne and levelled his gun along the aisle. He looks terrified, she thought. It had been her own pain, the threat to her own life, that had obsessed her since she’d woken half-stripped and exposed from her churu blackout. But here was Sean, protecting her because he knew it was right. And she could smell his fear, sense the tension in his body as he aimed the gun.

  “What?” Jayne said. “What is it?”

  “Dunno,” Sean said. He was glancing left and right, sweating. “When I say, get back into the rest room. You good to move?”

  The curtain whipped aside and she held her breath, readying for the gunshot. But it was the stewardess, holding on to the seats as she hurried along the aisle to them.

  “Far enough,” Sean said, sounding almost apologetic.

  “What’s happening?” Jayne asked.

  “We’ve got to land in Baltimore, like I told you,” the stewardess said.

  “And?” Sean asked.

  “Baltimore’s burning, and the airport’s been overrun.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sean whispered.

  The stewardess stood there for a while, saying nothing, staring at Jayne. She’d helped them, and perhaps she felt some investment in her. Or maybe she’s just thinking about what’s about to happen.

  “I live in…” the woman said. Then her face crumpled and she ran back along the cabin.

  “We need to get ready,” Sean said. He tucked the gun into his shoulder holster and went to the kitchen behind them. Jayne tried to turn in her seat, but the pain in her hips screamed out. She leaned back and sensed their descent.

  Baltimore’s burning.

  “Out of the frying pan…” she muttered as Sean sat next to her and handed her a bag.

  * * *

  One of the terminal buildings was on fire. Others looked untouched, but there were people on the concrete surrounding various parked aircraft. Some of them swarmed around a mobile staircase beside a 757, clambering up the stairs, falling from the top, rising to climb again. The thought of what might be happening inside the aircraft’s cabin was horrible, but Jayne could not turn away.

  The crowd’s attention turned to their own jet.

  “Hope the pilot’s got enough sense not to taxi back there,” Sean said. The plane touched down, they bounced, jolted left and right, and Jayne wondered whether the vagaries of fate would allow her to die in a plane wreck. But then the wheels hit the runway again and they were down. The aircraft’s jets roared in reverse thrust and Sean pressed an arm across the front of her shoulders to keep her back in her seat. She winced at the tensions in her body, and the pains they aggravated.

  “Soon as we slow to turn—” Sean said, and the aircraft veered so sharply to the left that Jayne was sure the wing tip would skim the ground and they’d be flipped.

  Screams from the cabin in front of them, hidden by swishing curtains. The continuing roar of the engines. And Jayne saw shapes below them, passing beneath the wing and the fuselage, and the smears of several people crushed across the concrete.

  “He’s dodging them,” she said, and Sean uttered a short, sharp laugh.

  The aircraft straightened, and as it slowed they felt several shuddering impacts. Jayne closed her eyes and saw Tommy struck by a bullet, and she was glad that he’d died so clean.

  As the engines powered back and the plane drifted to the right, Sean jumped from his seat and went to the rear exit door on the starboard side. “Are they all…?” he asked, amazed.

  “All infected,” Jayne said. “I can see blood.”

  Sean stood back and seemed to gather his thoughts. Then he went through the kitchen to the opposite door. “Here!” he called.

  Jayne was already out of her seat, wincing against the pain but finding movement relatively easy. Sean was removing a locking bar from the emergency-door handle.

  “When I open this, the chute inflates and forms a slide. You’ll have seen it in the movies. I’ll go down first, and you wait until I signal that it’s safe. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pulled his gun, looked at it, tucked it back in the holster. “Can you tie the bag to your belt?”

  Jayne did. It contained bottled water, a tin opener broken so that the blade was exposed, and a penknife. Not much of a survival kit.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered. Sean smiled at her and nodded. “Why are you doing this for me?” she asked.

  He held the door handle, breathing heavily, glancing outside, judging when to pull. “My daughter’s about your age,” he said. “Which sounds fucking trite, I know. Sad middle-aged motherfucker who couldn’t keep his family together.”

  “No, not trite,” she said.

  “And because you’re special. Bitten, but still well. And this…” He pointed at the window, what lay beyond.

  Saving his daughter by saving me, Jayne thought. And she smiled at the man, because he was honest.

  The plane stopped.

  “Okay,” he said. “One… two…”

  From the front of the plane came a heavy clunk! and the hiss of air as one of the aircraft’s other escape chutes was released. Someone shouted, and Sean and Jayne pressed their faces to the door’s window.

  They saw the first few people tumble from the end of the inflated chute, stand up and then look around in panic. Seconds later, shapes darted from beneath the aircraft and fell on them.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Sean said. He hadn’t seen this before.

  “I can’t do this,” Jayne said, “I can’t, I can’t…”

  “We can’t stay here,” he said. “They might climb the chute.”

  “Okay,” Jayne said, taking a deep breath. “Sean, I’ve seen them before. They’re fast. Their main aim is to spread whatever it is they have. They’re not like… you know, “real” zombies. Don’t eat your brains, shit like that.”

  Passengers scrambled on the chute, struggling to halt their slide after seeing what had happened to those who’d reached the ground. But it was to no avail. And by the time they reached the bottom, some of their bloodied fellow passengers were standing to welcome them.

  “Right,” Sean said, his voice and hands shaking. He took a couple of deep breaths. “We wait until those things start climbing the front chute, and when enough of them are distracted, I’ll pull the handle and we go through this exit. And I’ve got an idea of where we can go.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.” And he smiled. There was some measure of control in him again, as if his blood was up and he was now riding the situation. Once again, Jayne promised herself to ask about his scars.

  They leaned down to watch from the window. Passengers had stopped sliding down to their doom, and the zombies were beginning to climb the chute. There was screaming from further along the aircraft, and the sound of something ripping and hissing as they tried to dislodge the chute. But even as it deflated and shrank, the bloodied people still clawed their way upward. Some hung on tightly and stayed still while others used them for hand and footholds. A woman fell away, shoved from the aircraft doorway out of Jayne’s view, and her head cracked against the runway concrete.

  “Be lucky like that another fifty times,” Sean muttered.

  The curtain was ripped from its rail an
d the remaining passengers backed along the aisle, forgetting all about Jayne now that the true infection was among them.

  “The gun!” someone shouted. “The marshal’s at the back of the plane!”

  “You could hold them off,” Jayne said, and Sean hesitated, his hand still on the door handle.

  “He’s in!” someone shrieked.

  “Jayne,” Sean said. He turned the handle and stepped back. The door’s bolts blew and it fell outward, the chute inflating in seconds and before she could say anything Sean had dropped onto his behind and slid down.

  Instinct took over and Jayne did the same. If she’d waited a few more seconds she might have been trampled by the panicked passengers, or pulled back from the doorway so that others could escape. Because this was pure panic—screaming, raving, spitting panic.

  She slid down the chute and heard the first gunshot.

  “Hand!” Sean said, holding out his left hand. She took it. “Can you run?”

  “Yes.”

  He fired again, and a woman wearing a stewardess’s uniform flipped back and down. For a blink, Jayne thought it was their stewardess, but this one was Asian, her tights ripped and her legs pale.

  They ran directly away from the aircraft. There were shouts behind them, and Sean turned and fired again. Jayne could not help glancing back.

  Three shapes were rushing at them from around the plane’s forward exit, where the collapsed chute was still alive with zombies crawling and scrambling upward into the interior. Jayne hoped that the runners were escaped passengers, but then she saw the fresh blood across their mouths and chins.

  Sean paused and let go of her hand, and dropped them all with one shot each to the head.

  “Don’t slow down,” he said, grabbing her hand again.

  Someone had opened the rear door on the opposite side of the aircraft, and that chute too was now down. Several people had made it away and were running. They were being chased—the uninfected were easy to identify because they looked back over their shoulders in sheer terror. One of the men was holding an old woman’s hand and attempting to pull her along. The woman fell, and he knelt by her side, hugging her to his chest and refusing to let go. As the first of the pursuers reached the pair, Jayne looked away.

  There’s love, she thought. Unselfish, unconditional. I’ve had love like that. The idea filled her with a brief, irrational sense of elation, and she squeezed Sean’s hand. He squeezed back.

  They crossed a grass verge and headed onto another runway. This one was empty, and beyond it lay several wide taxiing routes where two large aircraft were parked. One of them had a mobile staircase against its side, and the door was open.

  Limbs aching, joints screaming at her to slow down, stop, rest, Jayne looked behind her again.

  “Sean, three more!”

  “We’ll outrun them.”

  “They’ll see where we’ve gone—what if they can communicate?”

  “Run on.” He let go of her hand and Jayne ran on, but then turned and slowed, walking backwards so that she could watch.

  Sean shot a woman, used two more bullets to down a teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt and a lipless grin, and when he fired at the last man his gun clicked on empty. He cursed, ducked, and drove his shoulder into the man’s midriff, standing and using the zombie’s momentum to propel him up and over. The zombie landed on his back with a dull thud, and before he could stand again Sean was stomping on his head, crushing it.

  Jayne ran towards the aircraft, swallowing down bile. Her vision swam. Smoke stung her throat and nose, and her eyes were watering. There was a bus parked a hundred feet from the plane’s left wing, and she kept a wary eye on it.

  “Let me go first!” Sean said from behind her. She slowed, he overtook her and grabbed her hand again, and then they were at the foot of the stairs. Panting, he slammed a fresh magazine into his gun and started up the staircase. “Wait halfway up. Stay ready to run back down.”

  Jayne nodded and sat on a stair, watching him climb and then looking back the way they had come. She hoped there had been more escapees, but she could see none. Scores of frantic figures were gathered around the plane’s exits, climbing the deflated chutes, falling back as those trapped inside struck them with feet or chairs or metal food canisters. A food trolley was shoved from one door, taking several clinging attackers with it. The forward door had been pulled shut again, and she wondered what was happening inside right now. She could see movement through the windows but could make no sense of it. Fighting to the last.

  “Jayne,” Sean called from above. “Come on.”

  She climbed the last few stairs and entered the aircraft, standing beside the marshal where he kept his gun at the ready.

  “Got to shut this door.” As he did that, Jayne stumbled towards the front and sank into a seat, starting to giggle when she realised this was the first time she’d ever been in First Class. She picked up some cutlery from a seat tray—real stainless steel, not the plastic stuff she was used to—and giggled some more. And when Sean appeared and raised an eyebrow she showed him the knife, and laughed so much that it nearly made her sick.

  * * *

  Sean checked the aircraft three more times before declaring it clear.

  They sat together, drinking orange juice and eating cold chicken curry, and then Jayne raided the First Class kitchen and found the drinks store. They cracked open a bottle of wine. They said little, because they could still hear the sounds of chaos from outside. Looking across to the aircraft they had abandoned, they saw that both starboard doors had been closed, and now and then they could make out vague movement inside. “Survivors,” Sean said, but Jayne could only imagine the alternative—that they’d somehow locked all the doors without realising that the contagion was inside, and now it was an aircraft filled with zombies.

  Sean tried his cellphone constantly but he could find no signal.

  Their aircraft had been stocked and prepped for flight. The seats were neat and tidy, kitchen lockers filled with ready-meals waiting to be warmed, and Sean said the fuel tanks were probably full.

  “Don’t suppose you know how to fly a 757?” he asked.

  They’d finished one bottle of wine and started on a second before Jayne asked him to finish his story.

  Sean looked at the gun on the small folding table he’d brought out of his seat. He rubbed his glass back and forth across his lip, then drained the red wine in one swig.

  “Does it matter any more?” he asked.

  “Sure. You saved me. It matters to me.”

  “But why’d you want to know?”

  Jayne shrugged, because there was no clear answer to that. “My granny told me never to trust a man with scars.”

  Sean touched his cheek. “I was a cop in New York,” he said at last. “I saw the towers come down, felt pretty hopeless. I’d put my years in, so I handed in my notice to become a sky marshal. Felt like that was taking action. Stupid, maybe.”

  “Not stupid,” Jayne said. “So is that how you got…?” She touched her own cheek.

  Sean snorted softly. “Last week on the job, some drunk in a Greenwich Village bar took a swing at me. Still holding his glass.”

  Jayne couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Shitty luck, pure and simple.

  Sean glanced around for the wine bottle, poured some more, and then paused. In the distance an aircraft’s jets roared.

  All the time they’d been hidden away no other aircraft had landed. Last one out of Knoxville, last one back to Hell, Jayne had quipped. They had seen fires in the distance, watched blood-covered people rushing across the airfield, and there had been a series of explosions from the main terminal.

  Now came a sound more familiar to airports.

  “Jesus!” Sean said, darting to the window. “Pilot must have survived.”

  It was the aircraft they’d come in on. It taxied away from them, one emergency chute still hanging deflated from a rear door. Its big wheels passed over one of the prone shapes b
eneath it.

  “Maybe he locked himself in the cockpit,” Jayne said.

  “Or the survivors have had a vote. Not much to stay here for.”

  “Didn’t the stewardess say they were flying on fuel fumes?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said.

  They watched, standing side by side. Five minutes after firing up its engines, the plane powered along the runway and lifted off. It climbed quickly, tilting its wings and catching the rays of the sinking sun as it headed north.

  “Canada?” Jayne said.

  “Maybe.”

  They moved to the other side of their aircraft to see the escaping one climb away. It was little more than a diamond in the sky, reflecting the tired yellow of late-afternoon sunlight, while Sean went to find another drink.

  And Jayne could not breathe as she watched the aircraft die, a falling star, barely visible as it plummeted into the hazy distance. She did not see the impact, and she turned away as Sean returned and asked her what was wrong. She told him.

  “Fumes,” he said.

  They opened another bottle of wine.

  8

  Every minute I’ve been out of it, Holly thought as she came around. Every minute, every second, it’s getting worse. The scenes that she had seen in the casting room flashed before her again and again, and before she opened her eyes she saw a parade of dead children and bloodied, blank faces.

  Drake Slater was sitting beside her as she surfaced. The fainting fit pulled away quickly, her senses returned, and she realised that she’d received a far lower dose of whatever had knocked her out than she had last time.

  “Nice way of greeting a visitor,” she muttered.

  “Sorry,” Drake said, not sounding like he meant it. “We’ve grown used to looking after each other.”

  “And you drugged me because I was losing my temper?” Holly sat up on a cot bed. The room around her was sparse and functional She ran a hand through her knotted hair, wishing for a brush, some shampoo. She was beginning to understand why the people here wore their hair short or in tight braids.

  “Moira heard you say “God”.”

  “Oh?” She’d already clocked their aversion to the G-word.