Coldbrook

by Tim Lebbon

  They bite him every year, Holly thought, trying to discern his intent. But his ruined face was unreadable, scar tissue having hardened it against the subtleties of expression. He’s immune, and they test him every year.

  “I’m not from your world,” she said. “I came through a breach from somewhere else. A parallel Earth. Another universe.”

  “Whatever,” he said, his one eye glittering. He grinned again, started singing once more, a wordless tune. Then he cut off his song. “One thing I ask, and I ask it of everyone, only when they get down here, though, not so Drake could hear, if Drake knew he wouldn’t approve, so don’t—”

  “No,” she said, trying to sound strong but hearing only fear in her voice.

  “Don’t interrupt.” He moved quickly, pinning her back against the table. “The one thing I ask is… when I’m inside you, I like to be bitten.”

  She shoved him back, pushing away from the table and heaving with all her strength. Mannan stumbled back against the bed, laughing, touching his scars again, one after the other and perhaps in the order of their annual origins, and as he came at her once more Holly realised that he was down here because he was mad.

  She darted to the left, heading for the gap in the room divider, but he was quick, and lithe for his age. He rolled across the bed and jumped over the divider, kicked a floor cushion, tripped her. By the time she’d gained her feet he was at the door. He shoved it closed.

  “Let me out,” she said.

  “You knew what you were doing, coming down here,” Mannan said. “They told you what you were doing, and what would happen, and that you need my child. So don’t be afraid. I might be scarred up here…” He indicated his scars again, that sequence of touches that might have become some kind of personal prayer. “But I’m not scarred here.” He unbuttoned his trousers and wriggled until they dropped. His erection sprang up, and he closed his hand around it, stroking.

  Holly thought of Vic and Jonah and the others at Coldbrook, and she felt certain that they were dead. If they were still alive, how could this be happening to her? How could she be so alone and so threatened, here in the depths of another Coldbrook?

  “I told you, I’m not from here,” she said. Her voice shook.

  Mannan came forward, a monster from the mind of Goya.

  Holly looked at his erection and smiled. He chuckled back at her—and she kicked him between his legs as hard as she could. He gasped in shock, then screamed louder in agony, and for a crazy moment she wanted to stay and apologise. But he grabbed for her foot, and when she took one step away from him she found it easier to take another.

  “One more scar, fucker,” she said. Then she ran.

  9

  “I am the Inquisitor,” the voice said, “and you will be the same.”

  Jonah opened his eyes and looked around his room. Nothing.

  “See what we have done,” the man said. Jonah tried to sit up, but there was a pressure on his shoulders, pushing him back down. That flailing red organ was pressing against his head once more. The Inquisitor was standing behind his bed, upside down in his vision and even more grotesque.

  * * *

  He sees people on a beach and drowning in the emerald sea, trying to escape the deadly tide from inland.

  “A living history of the greatest Inquisition,” the man said, lifting the orb away momentarily. Jonah gasped as he was pulled from the dream, glimpsing once again that smudged tattoo on the Inquisitor’s arm. He felt around on the bed for his gun, his finger brushed cold metal, and—

  He looks across the countryside at a farm, where cattle lie dead and bloated in untended fields and winged things swoop in to chew on them, carrion creatures almost the size of the cattle themselves, their auburn and white fur glimmering with wet blood.

  “And your world now needs you to write its final book.” The Inquisitor was beside the bed now, sticky wet mask held inches from his face. He pressed forward with the thing in his other hand one more time. Jonah lifted the gun. The Inquisitor moved swiftly, knocking the weapon back onto the bed, and Jonah felt those tendrils kissing his temple again, wondering if he was already dead…

  Eight people rush across red sands, eight hundred follow, and it is the living who will lose this race…

  Men and women with pronounced brows, wide faces, and more hair than anyone he has ever seen pursue the uninfected past a high bamboo wall…

  Thousands of dead bob in the ocean, clawing at the hull of a ship drifting in their midst…

  Biting, screaming, dying, rising, he saw it all, realising that much of what he was seeing was not from this world but another.

  And he had the dreadful sense of another mind existing alongside his own, believing that this all constituted a great cleansing.

  When the Inquisitor finally left him and Jonah sat up, he raised the gun and lifted it towards his head, remembering his father’s face and the strength he had given his son. “I am being strong,” he said, but something knocked the gun aside. He tried again, and it happened once more. There was nothing in the room with him. The muscles in his arm flexed, the skin was depressed as though squeezed by fingers, and for all the world he would have loved to believe it was Wendy insisting that he remain alive.

  But he knew that was a lie.

  10

  It was three hours before Sean was able to use the phone. Jayne had watched him trying again and again, had seen the subdued fear behind his eyes, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask.

  Outside the aircraft, fires raged in the airport terminal. The two of them kept away from the windows, afraid of being seen.

  “They’re aimless,” Jayne had said, watching one man stagger crablike across the wide concrete runway. His head rested on his left shoulder, and one leg was turned so that the foot faced backwards.

  “Only when there’s no one to bite,” Sean had replied.

  Jayne tried not to think about what would happen if they were discovered. The door was securely closed, and the only other way up to the aircraft cabin was to climb the wheel structures. We’re an island, she thought, imagining them surrounded by a sea of quiet, patient zombies. Perhaps they would gather and wait, a hundred of them or a thousand, or ten thousand when everyone else had been infected. Their purpose would not be complete until everyone was like them, and they would stare up at the aircraft windows, looking for signs of movement there and at the plane’s doors, standing through darkness and light, rain and sun, until something happened.

  “We’re trapped here,” she said.

  Sean’s face lit up.

  “Reception!” he said suddenly, walking away from Jayne as he tapped in a number, then standing with his back to her and the phone held against his ear. He dialled again, stood listening. And again.

  “Sean.”

  “Maybe she’s out,” he said.

  “What time is it over there?”

  Sean glanced at his watch. “Six hours ahead. Early morning.”

  “They’ll be in bed.”

  “She keeps her phone with her all the time. You know how girls are.” He came back and sat beside her again, looking at the phone as if willing her to call back. But it remained silent.

  “Maybe her phone’s off.” Jayne could think of nothing else to say. There could be a hundred reasons why his daughter was not answering, but only one that really mattered.

  “France?” he said. “Could it really have reached France?”

  “I can’t see how.”

  Sean stared at her for a long moment and neither of them spoke. Then he stood and went to a window again, careful not to get too close as he looked outside.

  “I’ve got to tell someone about you,” he said.

  “What about that immunity register?”

  Sean shook his head, held up his cellphone. “Online. I’m still a dinosaur, no smartphone for me. I can call and text people on this, that’s about it.”

  “How about… what’s it called? Centers for Disease Control. I read about i
t in that Stephen King book.”

  “Never read him,” Sean said, turning around. “I’m more of a thriller guy.”

  “Well…” Jayne said, no knowing what to say.

  “Wait a minute,” Sean said. “There is someone I can call. Just hope I still have the damn number.”

  “Who is it?”

  Sean sat beside her again and placed a hand on her leg. His palm was hot, his hand heavy, and Jayne closed her own hand around his.

  “Old school buddy,” Sean said. “Moved to the UK, became a doctor. Always was a clever bastard.” He searched for a moment, then gave a yelp of joy and put the phone to his ear.

  “Leigh? Sean. Yeah, man, I’m fine. Can you fuckin’ believe it?” He paused, nodding, and Jayne heard the distant whisper of a voice she did not know. “Well, listen to this,” Sean continued. “Got something else you’re never gonna believe, and I need your advice on how to handle it.”

  And he told his old school buddy about Jayne.

  * * *

  Leigh Keene hung up the phone and sat up in bed.

  “What is it?” his wife asked. She’d started awake when the phone rang, and already sounded sleepy again. He had no idea how she could sleep with all that was happening in America.

  “Old school friend in the States,” Leigh said. “I’ve got to go downstairs.”

  “’kay,” she said. She sighed softly, already asleep. I hope you can stay so peaceful, Leigh thought, and his heart ached with worry for her and their baby son who was asleep in the next room. Leigh was a paediatric consultant at a big London hospital—loved kids, always had—and he could barely breathe because of his fear of what was happening.

  Downstairs, he sat at his desk and flicked on the wall-mounted TV. He blinked in shock. “Jesus. South America.” He tapped the desktop nervously, then dialled a number on his BlackBerry.

  * * *

  Four thousand miles away in Toronto, a woman dabbed at her mouth and excused herself from the table. She walked outside the restaurant as she answered her phone, pulling a cigarette from her pocket at the same time. It had been a weird night, marked with an almost manic need to indulge. It had reminded her of a movie she’d seen about what everyone did for their last night on Earth. It was fucking terrifying, but the atmosphere dragged her on.

  She paused as she saw the name on the display. Pressed connect. “Leigh?”

  “Emma! Emma, thank Christ, I thought you weren’t going to pick up.”

  “I’m at a restaurant.” It was raining. She stood under a canopy with other banished smokers and lit up.

  “Good,” Leigh said. “Good. I thought… I don’t know what.”

  “I’m not munching on brains yet,” she said, and a couple of her smoking companions glanced her way. Emma glared back; she’d never been shy.

  “I know this is out of the blue, and we haven’t spoken for a long time, but—”

  “It’s been four years,” she said.

  “Yeah. Sometimes feels like yesterday. Listen, are you safe? Do you have a plan?”

  “I’m fine,” Emma said. “Leigh, I’d love to think this is all because you’re concerned about me, but I can’t believe that.”

  “I’ve always cared,” he said.

  She wondered where he was now, where his new wife and child were, and she was jealous all over again. “Yeah,” she said.

  “Emma… I have some information about someone important. And you’re the only person I could think of who might know what to do.”

  Emma closed her eyes.

  * * *

  Emma called her cousin—Tim Love, a cop—and told him about the immune girl in burning Baltimore. Before he headed out with his unit to Bethleham, where he would have his infected brains blown out by a bullet from Lieutenant Susco’s pistol, Love called a friend of his in the Baltimore PD. His friend called four people and ordered that they prepare for a rescue mission to Baltimore Airport, and one of those people—a corrupt Sergeant called Waits who was buried up to his ass in the city’s main drugs-distribution ring—called his mistress in New York to say goodbye. And he told her where he was going, and why.

  The mistress was married to Nathan King, a writer and boozer. A troubled man, King had many acquaintances but only a handful of true friends. And one of those friends was an eccentric gay scientist the size of a grizzly bear, called Marc Dubois.

  King called Marc, and told him what his wife had heard.

  11

  “I knew she was getting it in the ass from someone, but a fucking cop?”

  Marc glanced at Vic and Gary. He’d switched the phone to loudspeaker as soon as King had told him the news.

  “What?” Vic whispered, holding up his hands. Marc had gone white but something about his manner indicated excitement. Over the past few hours Vic had seen enough terrible sights with Marc to know how the man reacted to bad news. This was something different.

  “Say it again,” Marc said. “I’ve got some people here who need to hear it.”

  “I said I knew the bitch was—”

  “Fuck it, Nathan, I don’t give a shit about who’s drilling your wife!” Marc said. “The reason you called me. Me, of all people. The reason, Nathan.”

  King told them what he’d heard. Vic listened to the rest of the conversation in a confused state, and not because he couldn’t hear the words. It was his heart. It had become a rock in his chest, a solid weight that he didn’t dare call hope. Immune! The online register had become a joke, with thousands of entries and thousands more red-lined “discredited” markers. If this was true, the woman trapped in an aircraft at Baltimore airport—bitten, still alive, still human—might just be the most important person on the planet.

  “Vic?” Marc said, and Vic realised the tall man had been talking to him.

  “Sorry. I… Yeah.”

  “I said, we should trust this. Her name’s Jayne Woodhams, and she’s not on the register. Doesn’t matter how it got to us, and I can’t imagine how King heard about it. He’s a drunken pseudo-philosopher, not a scientist. But…”

  “Immune.” It was all Vic could say.

  “So what do we do?” Gary asked. He was leaning back against a desk and wearing a big cowboy hat.

  “Someone has to get her and keep her safe,” Vic said. “There’s that place in Atlanta, the disease place. Get her there.”

  “You’ve seen what’s happening in Atlanta!” Marc said.

  “Have you heard from them?” Gary asked.

  “No,” Marc said, shaking his head. “I know a dozen people at the CDC. Can’t reach any of them. The phones just ring.”

  “So where else?” Vic asked.

  “You know where else,” Marc said. “I told you, I’m the best disease expert in the northern hemisphere.”

  “I thought you were boasting,” Vic said, but he was thinking of Lucy and Olivia, and how safe they might be in that sparsely furnished room.

  “Here,” Gary said.

  “Yes,” Marc said. “We’ve got to fly to Baltimore and bring her back.”

  * * *

  It was Marc’s idea that Lucy and Olivia should go with them. Vic’s sense of relief when the phorologist suggested that they should stay together was immense—there was no way he’d ever have left them behind, but the thought of confronting Marc over that had troubled him.

  Olivia knew that everything was wrong. She grasped her rag doll Scruffy in her left hand, and its hair was wet and stringy from where she’d been chewing. But how could he explain so that she would understand when he didn’t understand himself?

  “Where are we going?” Olivia asked.

  “You ever been to Baltimore, honey?” Gary asked.

  “Uhhh…” Olivia glanced up at Vic, then shook her head.

  “Well, we’re going to visit a lady there.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jayne,” Gary said.

  “But can we fly in the dark?”

  “My helicopter is special. It’s called an Agus
ta 109—very nice, very expensive—and it has computers and electronic gizmos and other magic stuff, all there to tell us whether it’s safe to fly, and whether there’s anyone else close by.”

  “Magic.” Olivia looked at Gary and giggled uncertainly.

  Marc entered the room, a heavy bag over one shoulder, and when Vic offered to take it Marc shook his head. “Not now,” he said quietly.

  Gary made a pantomime of putting on his cowboy hat and leaving the room, then turned back and knelt so that he was on Olivia’s level. “Say, honey, you want to come and sit in the pilot’s seat?”

  “Yeah!” the girl said.

  “Is it safe?” Lucy asked.

  “It’s fine,” Marc said. “I’ve just been up there to check.”

  Olivia and Gary left, and Marc placed the bag on a desk. The desk’s legs creaked, and Vic saw the sheen of sweat across the man’s forehead. He knew what he was carrying.

  “I hate guns,” Lucy said, moving to Vic’s side so that their arms pressed together.

  “And I hate zombies,” Marc said, hefting the bag again. “Shall we?”

  * * *

  Olivia was sitting in the helicopter wearing the pilot’s helmet, its dark visor down, while Gary sat next to her, running through a pre-flight check. Vic saw her through the windshield and felt an intense gratitude. How Gary had managed to get her across the roof and into the machine without her seeing or hearing any of the chaos below, Vic did not know. But he would have to thank the man later.

  From the roof, everything they saw of Cincinnati meant death. Fires consumed the city, screams gave the fires voice, and the stink of cooking flesh added an extra dimension of nightmare to the screams. At least one of the city centre’s distant skyscrapers was ablaze, and a series of mysterious explosions thumped in the far distance.