by Tim Lebbon
‘He’ll be busy.’ Lucy nodded slowly, rubbing an ache in the back of her neck. ‘Holly Wright went through,’ Vic said, not sure why he’d blurted that now. Perhaps she had been on his mind, beneath the fear for his family and what was to come. Perhaps leaving her behind was just another facet of his guilt.
‘Through the breach?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where the thing that started this came from?’
Vic nodded, unable to answer. He felt a weight behind his eyes, and his heart was thumping fast. Don’t let me see that look in your eyes, he thought, remembering the dream of his sister and Lucy.
They ate, used the toilet, and left the diner as quickly as possible. As Vic drove, Lucy tried once again to call her parents in Los Angeles and her brother in Seattle. But the networks were still overloaded.
As she put the phone down once more, they passed by the sign for Cincinnati.
They met Marc Dubois where Jonah had arranged, in a private staff car park at the university. He was sitting on the hood of his car as they pulled up, and Vic saw him checking out their RAV4. In one hand he carried a satphone, in the other he held a cigarette. He did not smile but leaned in Vic’s window, breathing cigarette smoke over him. ‘One, two, three,’ he said, nodding at each of them without expression, and then he turned away and dialled his phone.
Vic glanced across at Lucy. She raised an eyebrow, then he opened the door and stepped out. His legs and arms were aching, both from the long drive and the escape from Coldbrook that had preceded it. He wished once again that he’d spent more time in that gym.
‘Marc Dubois?’ Vic asked, though he already knew who he was talking to. Tall gent, Jonah had told him. Should play basketball but he hates sport. Good-looking bastard. Looks like he should be a lady’s man, but he’d more likely go for you. Marc is a genius. You’ll like him, Vic. Eventually.
‘Jonah,’ the man said into the phone. His voice was low, slow and measured. ‘They’re here. All three.’ He nodded a couple of times, then half-turned and looked at Vic over his shoulder. ‘So you want me to kill him now, or later?’
Vic tried not to react.
‘Okay,’ Marc said. ‘Speak soon.’ He pocketed the phone and sat back gently on the hood of his car. ‘He said to kill you later.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Jonah,’ Vic said. ‘He’s usually one to act on the moment.’
‘Seems to think you might be able to help me first.’
‘Well . . .’ Vic said, trying to size up this man. He gave nothing away. ‘I thought perhaps it was the other way around.’
‘You think?’ Marc asked. Then after a pause he offered a half-smile. ‘Just fucking with you. Here.’ He held out his hand and Vic shook it. ‘So, let’s meet your family.’
Lucy and Olivia were stepping from the car, and when Vic introduced them Marc produced a candy bar for Olivia.
‘You want to see some rabbits?’ he asked Olivia. She squealed.
‘Can I hold one?’
‘Oh, honey—’ Lucy said, but Marc interrupted.
‘Sure you can! One of them is called Olivia, and I’m sure she’ll love you.’
‘You’re just joking!’ Olivia said through her laughter.
Marc pulled a face. ‘You got me. I’m joking. She’s actually called Lady. But I’m not joking when I say she’ll love you.’
He looked up at Vic and Lucy, glancing back and forth as if sizing them up.
‘Jonah said—’ Vic began, and Marc cut him off.
‘You okay to drive?’ he asked Lucy.
‘Sure.’
‘Cool. Ride with me, Vic. Need to fill you in on a few things. My place is five miles up into the hills, and I want to get there by nightfall.’
‘Why?’ Olivia asked.
‘Because,’ Marc said, leaning in close to the little girl and putting on a spooky voice, ‘that’s when the monsters come out!’
‘Monsters? Like zombies?’
Marc stood again, staring down at Olivia from his great height. Then he turned and opened his car door. ‘Come on. Light’s wasting.’
‘Lady rabbit awaits,’ Vic said to Lucy, and he kissed his little girl before climbing in beside Marc.
The tall man drove in silence for a while. Vic positioned his wing mirror so that he could keep an eye on Lucy behind them, then he glanced several times at Marc. In profile he presented an intimidating picture – sharp nose, sloping forehead, bald head, lush beard, cigarette smoking in the corner of his mouth. His arms were long, his hands big. He might have been a wrestler or a boxer, rather than what he was. In any other circumstance but this, Vic might have felt comforted by his presence.
‘That old Welsh bastard really asked you to kill me?’ Vic asked, only half-joking.
Marc turned to look at him, staring for so long that Vic wanted to shout, Don’t forget you’re driving!
‘You have a nice family,’ Marc said. ‘Your daughter is delightful. Your wife’s pretty, but sad.’
Vic sighed and looked out of the passenger window. The RAV4 was following close behind and he wished he was still with them, singing with Olivia and holding Lucy’s hand.
Marc reached over into the back seat while still driving, rooting around for something. ‘Here. Thought I should show you this.’ He dropped an iPad into Vic’s lap and Vic winced when the corner dug into his groin.
‘What’s this?’
‘Open it, access the net. I’ll give you the website to look at.’ Vic did what he was told, then Marc read out a series of numbers and letters forming a website address. After that, a user ID and password.
‘What am I looking at?’ Vic asked.
‘Something you shouldn’t be.’
‘Whatever Jonah told you—’
‘Is true. I’ve known that man for over forty years. How old are you?’
‘Forty,’ Vic said.
‘Fucking kid. Listen here, Vic. I’m going to do the best I can, and you’re going to help me. But what Jonah told me . . . I can’t just forget that. Can’t forget what a fucking stupid prick you were, wrecking every safeguard built into that place. Can’t forget what a selfish motherfucker you were, leaving them down there and escaping to save your own damn skin. I’m supposed to be working with you – it’s good that I know what a clumsy fucker you are.’
‘You don’t sound French,’ Vic said after a pause. The man intimidated the hell out of him, but he wanted to present some attitude, stand his ground. He was doing enough beating himself up as it was, without taking it from someone else as well.
‘Mother was from Quebec.’ Marc reached over and tapped the screen. ‘Now look. You got some catching up to do.’
Vic looked. The page was laid out in thumbnails, each with a brief description underneath. He clicked on the first, and watched.
Over the next fifteen minutes, while Marc drove and smoked silently and Lucy followed on behind, Vic watched a selection of videos that displayed just how bad things had become. They seemed to have been taken from many sources: hand-held hi-def video cameras; mobile-phone footage; images taken from press sites and news programmes; aerial views, probably from police or military choppers; and several videos that looked as though they’d been taken by a soldier’s gun- or helmet-mounted camera.
‘What is this site?’ Vic asked halfway through. He’d just watched a group of raging, blood-soaked people swept from a roadway by a huge truck with a cattle guard on the front, and then a dozen men machine-gunning them in a ditch. The camera shook as the shooting took place, and turned away when the first of the men lobbed in a grenade.
‘Military site a friend of mine gave me access to,’ Marc said. ‘There’s been some rapid response, as you can see. But the scope of this thing is huge. It’s spreading like ripples in a pond, except that they’re getting bigger and faster. It’s hit beyond Charlotte in the east, Atlanta in the south, and there are even reports from Nashville.’
‘All in a day,’ Vic said.
‘Yeah. A day.’
‘But we’re fighting back, right? The government? The military?’
Marc looked at him, another of those long stares that suggested he’d forgotten that he was driving.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But what do they think they’re fighting? No one believes in zombies.’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Think about it,’ Marc said, cutting him off again. ‘You’ve been listening to the radio. Heard the panic. The religious nuts saying this is the end, God’s will, Armageddon. The jokers suggesting that media panic is overblowing everything, it’s nothing but a bunch of fucking smacked-up college kids copying each other, japes and jokes on the scale of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast. And the official statements tell us less than the radio jocks and the screamed eyewitness accounts recorded by ambulance-chasing reporting teams. Then there’re the fucking experts, names pulled off the shelves by radio and TV stations to be talking heads while the news guys go and have their make-up touched up. And none of these fuckers have a clue. Because they don’t have an open mind.’
‘But the army,’ Vic said. ‘The government.’
‘Yeah, there’s been shooting and Chinooks flying around. Who knows, they might have some fancy new crap which they can finally get to try out on some moving targets. You know Bill Hicks?’
‘No,’ Vic said.
‘Pull up G-Twelve!’ Marc chuckled, lit another cigar-ette and inhaled, and Vic went to open a window. But he thought better of it.
‘But the spread,’ Vic said. ‘That’s your field, right?’
‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve never, ever seen anything spreading as fast as this. It’s almost word-of-mouth speed, and that’s unstoppable by force. So we’ve got two hopes, and neither of them involves bullets and bombs. First, this thing dies out of its own accord. Whatever the contagion is – and others are working on that – it’s come from somewhere else. That place you and Jonah reached. Maybe . . .’ He waved his hand, as if to pluck an idea from the air, and chuckled again. ‘The ghost of H. G. Wells will save us, and the cold virus will wipe this thing out.’ He took another long drag on the cigarette.
‘And the other possibility is a cure.’
‘Right. And that’s where I come in.’
‘And me?’
‘You?’ Marc said, glancing sidelong at Vic. ‘Jonah tells me you have a good mind. Sharp. A clear way of lateral thinking. Considering he thinks you’re a shit, he talked you up pretty good. So, you’re my gofer. I tell you jump, you jump.’
‘Great,’ Vic said, and he looked down at the iPad again, opening another file. Something was niggling at him. Something he’d seen, but not registered.
‘Yeah,’ Marc said. He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old. ‘And when it’s all over and we’ve saved the world, then I get to kill you.’
4
Jonah stood with the gun in his hand and looked down at his dead friend.
Satpal lay in a sticky puddle of his own blood. Also in the puddle, curled from the moisture, was a photograph of his family back in India. Jonah knew that he visited them at least twice each year, and that they were proud of him.
The first two closed doors on the accommodation corridor had revealed nothing. He’d opened them slowly, carefully, with the gun at the ready, expecting the silence to be shattered with violence. But both rooms were empty, neat and tidy. Whoever had lived in them was dead somewhere else.
Maybe if I’d come down here earlier I could have saved him. Satpal had locked his door from the inside and then cut his wrists with a pocket knife. The wounds looked rough, torn rather than sliced, as if the knife was blunt. It lay close to the photograph.
The blood reflected the ceiling light, and the dead man looked too still. In Coldbrook’s sterile environment there were no flies, few insects, and Satpal was destined to rot alone.
Jonah closed the door and locked it again, using his universal key. ‘I really am on my own,’ he said, leaning his head against the door frame – and then someone walked past the end of the corridor.
Jonah raised the gun and took a few steps back, gasping, his heart stuttering and then racing again. The shadow flitted away, cast by the ceiling lights in the corridor perpendicular to the one he was in. He could tell nothing of the shadow’s shape or origin, but he heard no footsteps, no breathing.
There was only one way out from the corridor. Trying to breathe softly and evenly, Jonah started forward. Twenty feet until the junction, fifteen, and still he could neither hear nor see anything. Dried blood smeared the floor, and there was a shoe propped against the wall. It was white and pristine.
He clasped the gun in both hands, waiting for the shadow to flit back again and whatever had cast it to emerge. Someone else alive, but it was a vain hope.
This time there was no shadow. The figure walked around the corner and came towards Jonah, his swollen eyes and spiky hair glistening, the protruding mouth gasping out small clouds of moisture, and in his right hand was the organ-like object with a dozen tendrils tasting the air.
Jonah’s breath caught in his throat, and he tried to perceive any kind of humanity in this man. But other than his shape, and number of limbs, and gait, there was none.
Jonah’s hands shook – this nightmare was so real, the fear he felt so deep and thick, his heart skipping, breath punched from his lungs with shock—
This time I’m not asleep. As the organ-object kissed Jonah’s head, his finger squeezed the trigger and—
—the explosion rips through the heart of the ship, erupting from its upper decks and tearing a hole in its hull. Fire and smoke gush out and, as seawater roars into the gap, steam billows in great clouds. They catch the sun and throw rainbows across the terrible scene.
The people with him in the lifeboat cry out in grief and terror. The impact thuds into the small boat, conveyed through the water, and several seams break. Some start bailing, while those sitting on the three cross-braces start to row.
He tries to speak, reaches out to touch, but he is not there. All to die, a voice says, and in a spray of water he glimpses that distorted face.
Several people lift long boathooks, because they know what is coming. Jonah sees the shapes swimming towards the boat, scores of them pushing through the violent waves, each face blank, distinguished only by eyes he has seen before, those dead eyes.
No point. They should submit.
The first of the swimmers reaches the boat. A hand curls over the gunwale. Two of her fingers are missing, the wounds grey and bloodless.
Jonah tries to close his eyes, but he sees the first wet body roll into the boat, hears the crunching of her skull as one of the survivors crushes it with their boathook, and then—
—the people finish floating through the air, landing on delicate legs and shrugging light packs from their backs. They stand on the edge of a ravine, the ground beneath them sandy, the sky a startling blue. They wear silver belts heavy with weapons, none of which Jonah recognises. He is stunned at their technology.
They already carry hopelessness in their hearts. That voice, so harsh, it is the thing that haunts.
One of the people is wounded, fine clothing torn and slick with blood. She sinks slowly to her knees and the others go to help. The scene has the air of post-battle, and he wonders what they have left behind.
Then he sees that they have not gone to help at all. One of them pulls a weapon, and the woman looks up at him sadly, and her eyes remain open as he blasts her in the head—
—the child falls, and lands in the mass of creatures below, and they crowd in and bite like hunting dogs going for a chunk of meat. A man wails but the others ignore him, and Jonah wants to shout, Can’t you understand what he’s lost?
The network of platforms, ladders and bridges hangs from several tall trees. It’s an impressive engineering feat, but he does not have the inclination to admire it. Across the platforms there are people shouting, and then he sees why.
The zombies are climbi
ng the uprights, slow and clumsy. Most of them fall or are shot down by marksmen with steam-powered weaponry. But not every zombie falls. For every hundred that do not make it, one manages to crawl onto one of the platforms. The fighting then becomes hand-to-hand, and everyone is involved. Even the children.
Jonah sees a woman hunkered beneath a flexible canopy, a baby at her breast and a long curved knife in her other hand. She is ready to free her child, and herself.
No, he pleads, please don’t, don’t make me see.
The air of this place is filled with their stench, and the aroma speaks of hopelessness.
They all fall in the end.
Jonah closes his eyes—
—the man stepped back and let him go. He had fallen to his knees in the corridor, and for a moment he glanced around expecting to see the burning sea, or the falling dead, or those people floating their way from terror to terror.
Does it really all come to this? he wondered. But, of course, it had – and it would again. Satpal had shown that. A brilliant man, he had seen how things were and had made his choice.
‘But not me,’ Jonah said. He picked up the gun and fired at his abuser. The man could have killed him at any moment. But he didn’t want Jonah dead. He wanted him to see.
‘Bastard,’ Jonah said. He looked for a gunshot wound in the man’s chest, but was not surprised to see none. The man had retreated to the end of the corridor, and stood staring at him, unmoving.
He comes from through there, showing me what happened to his world.
But why?
Jonah was rational and in full control of his faculties, though events were running away with him, and the idea of madness had seeped away. Yet while he had an answer for the raging things – which required irrational leaps of science – he had no answer for this.
He raised the gun and fired again. The man snorted – his mask emitting skeins of mist or steam – and then he walked calmly out of sight.
‘Tell me what you want,’ Jonah said after the noise of the gunshot had echoed away. But there was only silence.
5
In some ways, Marc reminded Vic of a younger Jonah, though he looked nothing like him – Jonah was thin and wiry, Marc was heavily built and strong. But there was a grace about him, an inner strength. Perhaps knowing more about the world than most people gave him a peace of mind that many others lacked.