Coldbrook (Hammer)

by Tim Lebbon

  On the ridge she tried to find her bearings. Another ridge across the valley cut a recognisable line against the faint moonlight, spiked here and there with more trees than she was used to, yet it was a place that she knew from her own world. And closer, the slope she was about to take down from this hilltop swept towards the valley floor in a familiar bowl shape, home to a narrow creek and a chattering stream, slopes clothed with trees. She had come climbing here once with Melinda, searching for old birds’ nests, and both of them had been in awe of the wilderness around them.

  The wilderness closed in on her now, though, and awe was tainted with fear.

  She moved down from the hilltop into another dip in the landscape and crossed a stream, lifting the hem of her shapeless dress and gasping at the water’s coldness. On the opposite bank she paused, and thought she heard footsteps.

  Holly inhaled sharply and held her breath. She looked around, but could see no one, nothing. Animal, she thought, but that brought no comfort at all. It could be anything.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Holly?’ she whispered, but nothing replied, nothing ran at her.

  She continued across an open area of hillside, noticing a dense woodland that began thirty metres down the slope from her. She was certain she remembered this from her journey here, but back then it had not felt so threatening. Now she sensed things among the trees, things that smelled like old stale clothes thrown out.

  Just spooked, she thought. And as she tried convincing herself of that, she saw them.

  Several figures came out of the shadows, little more than shadows themselves. It took only moments to see what they were, and Holly cried out in fear, firing the bolt already loaded into the crossbow. It whispered uselessly away into the darkness. They shuffled uphill towards her, and she was glad that the poor light hid their features.

  She sprinted to put distance between herself and the stumbling furies. She didn’t know whether they could run, had no idea if they could track her by her scent. She knew nothing about them and her fear was like a cold rock in her stomach. She had a growing certainty that she was going to die in this older, deader world.

  Seeing the furies made her more aware of shadows across the hillside where there should be none, movement that might or might not be plants shifting in the breeze. She paused for a moment and tried to reload the crossbow – there was a rack of six bolts on its underside – but dropped the bolt and cried out as her finger caught in the mechanism. She picked up the bolt and ran on.

  It was difficult for Holly to admit that she was lost. Everywhere she saw views that she might have seen when they’d brought her here. But when she followed a gurgling stream in the hope that it might be the one running past the breach, and found herself among ruins, she could no longer deny the truth.

  At first she was not quite sure what she was seeing. The mounds were uneven, the plant growth thick. But then she saw an obvious wall on her left, its upper few feet camouflaged with a few lone ivy tendrils, its blocks square and even.

  Holly tried to place where she was in relation to her own world – if the hillside had been similar to that location on her Earth, then these ruins should not be here. But she and Drake had failed to pinpoint precisely where the two worlds’ realities had parted and become differing possibilities, and this could be anywhere.

  She moved on, because she still sensed the worst dangers were creeping up on her from behind.

  It must once have been a small town at least, because the deeper in she went, the more regularly spaced the ruins became. There were house-sized buildings with roofs stripped away and few walls remaining upright, larger structures with sparse steel ribs stark against the sky, and a set of sharp curves that froze her to the spot. Rusted, one of them missing its upper portion, their shape and design seemed unmistakable, and she had always known them as the Golden Arches.

  ‘McDonald’s?’ she whispered, almost laughing. ‘Fucking McDonald’s!’ But Holly could not pause to wonder. All around her there was movement in the shadows.

  She plunged ahead, following what had once been a road. Now was just a clearer pathway between ruins, turning slowly to the left and heading uphill to the shoulder of a narrow valley. For a moment it seemed familiar, and she was struck with a peculiar sense of déjà vu, a disconcerting feeling that she was not doing any of this of her own volition. She had walked this way before.

  Holly tripped, staggered forward, found her balance, and then tripped again. She dropped the crossbow and put out her hands, cushioning her fall against a wall. She gasped and breathed deeply a few times, trying to calm her galloping heart. And then whatever was moving made itself heard.

  Nails against stone, bone against brick. And the ground around her feet shifted.

  Fuck fuck fuck – she pushed herself upright and snatched up the crossbow. Something bumped against her shoe. She staggered back a few steps and watched a figure rising, arms splayed against the wall, bony fingers clawing at the ivy-covered brickwork.

  Holly knew that she should run but something held her there. A sick fascination at the sight before her. A terror at the old, dry smell released to the moonlight. A sense of unreality at what she saw standing, because now there was more than one. The ivy-clad wall seemed to shiver as the plant stalks were tugged and ripped by many hands, and the shadowy heap along its base resolved itself into terrible shapes. They pushed themselves up through a covering of trailing plants, and their stale stench was mixed with the tang of turned earth. They must have been there for a very long time.

  They sense me, Holly thought. And at last that gave her the impetus to run. The old dead town around her rustled as undead things shifted. She clasped the crossbow nervously, conscious that it had only six bolts. Flight, not fight, was her only hope.

  As she fled the ruined settlement her lungs burned and her legs ached, but she could never stop running. Every backward glance revealed that she was being followed. She sensed other shadows stirring around her: a wet shape rising from a cold stream here; three small figures crawling from the space beneath a fallen tree there. And while none of them appeared to move quickly, their direction was relentless – up, and towards her.

  Holly ran uphill, and as she began to believe that she’d taken entirely the wrong direction and was lost in this place that she had named Gaia she passed a pile of fallen masonry that looked familiar. The first time she’d been here she had been traumatised by her journey through the breach, her senses mangled by memory, the sweat of fear slick on her cool skin and the sight of the blood-drenched Melinda still imprinted on her mind’s eye. Now she looked around and realised the extent of the ruins she had stumbled across. What she had taken to be rock formations were actually leaning walls, clothed in creeping plants, and the stark angles of a bare tree were in fact rusted ribs from a building’s corroded metal roof. Allowing herself a moment’s pause, Holly approached the slumped building where she had rested once before and recognised the place where she had sat. Looking closer at the Exit sign carved in stone, she wondered briefly who had once walked beneath it.

  The breach lay downhill from here, in the next valley. The infection was already loose in her Coldbrook, and she had to weigh that knowledge against the risk of leading the pursuing furies through.

  In the end, her survival instinct won out.

  Down in the valley, the site of the breach was sheltered from the wash of moonlight by the hillside. Yet there was a glow down there, nestled in the shadows like a smudge on her sight. But to the left and right Holly’s night vision picked out a worrying detail – two silhouettes, upright, motionless against the breach’s impossible light.

  The idea of being almost home drove her on.

  As she made her way down the hillside, she made sure that the crossbow was ready.

  Every sense alert, her breath shallow and fast, blood pumping with adrenalin, Holly moved as fast as she dared down to the valley floor. She followed the stream, pausing to glance around after every few steps.
I’m going to shoot someone through the head, she thought, but they were no longer ‘someone’. These were little more than remnants, Godless and a travesty against nature. Once they might have had a life, but their stories had come to an end before she was born in a universe far away.

  Approaching the breach, she caught a whiff of something terribly familiar. She gasped in surprise, a sense of unreality washing over her yet again. The scent of mulled wine brought a rush of memories. She blinked them away and advanced, the crossbow held ready before her.

  The voices were low and relaxed, chatter between people who knew each other well. There were maybe six distinct voices, men and women, and none of them sounded afraid.

  Why aren’t they scared? Holly wondered, and the weight of the threat behind her spurred her on. She moved forward, and when she heard the first sign of surprise in their voices she spoke up.

  ‘I’m no fury!’ she said.

  ‘Step forward!’ someone responded.

  Holly held the crossbow up, swinging it left and right as she moved into the eerie glow. There were still two of them standing in front of the breach, aiming their own weapons towards her, and several more were gathered around a steaming pot to her left.

  ‘It’s the visitor,’ she heard one of them whisper, and she could not hesitate. She had no idea if this world’s humans could communicate across large distances, if this group knew of her escape, or whether they’d been told to stop her at all costs. She did not know anything, except that her own world was a few small steps away. And she so wanted to be there, even after everything she had been shown in the casting room.

  ‘Out of my way,’ Holly said, circling around them and approaching the breach.

  ‘We can’t let you through,’ one of them said. He stood his ground, but she could feel nervousness radiating from him in waves.

  ‘You’re not “letting” me through,’ Holly said, ‘I’m insisting on it. And there are furies behind me, maybe hundreds of them, and—’

  ‘Hundreds?’ another of them asked. A woman, she seemed less intimidated by Holly, and more in control. She’d be the one to watch.

  ‘They rose from the ruins,’ Holly said.

  ‘You went into the ruins?’ a man gasped.

  ‘I . . .’ Holly began. But they were whispering, and their fear was palpable. Holly glanced up and back at the hilltop, relieved to see it was still an unmoving silhouette against the strange sky.

  ‘They track you,’ the woman said.

  ‘Then come through with me.’ Holly lowered the crossbow, feeling vaguely stupid aiming it at another human being. She could never kill anyone human, she realised, and if they restrained her by force she would have to accept that. She desperately needed to get through, but she could not take human life to do so.

  ‘Through?’

  ‘There.’ Holly nodded at the breach, nestled thirty metres behind them at the foot of the hill like a haze of mist catching moonlight.

  ‘Travel through there has been forbidden,’ the woman said.

  ‘But you won’t stop me,’ Holly said. She caught a look between the two guards and their companions, a quick glance that spoke volumes. The woman guard started signalling with the fingers of one hand. ‘No,’ Holly said, and she raised the crossbow again. ‘I have to get home.’

  ‘We have orders.’

  ‘There’s no more time.’ Holly took one last look behind her. Dawn was already penetrating the dusty atmosphere, lighting up the hillsides, and she could see movement up there now.

  Another series of finger signals but Holly was no longer concerned with their stand-off. They were all out of time.

  Lowering the crossbow for the second time, she ran between the guards towards the breach beyond them.

  3

  The nights, Jayne realised, were always going to be the worst. Tired, terrified, and vaguely hungover, Jayne stirred from a dream-filled sleep and took a couple of seconds to remember what had happened. She’d once enjoyed these brief moments before the stab of pain, these seconds of reconstruction, when her waking mind would bring together the disparate strands of her life and identity to remind her who she was.

  Today it took her two whole heartbeats to remember that Tommy was dead.

  ‘They’re still out there,’ a man’s voice said.

  Jayne kept her eyes closed for a moment longer, examining the ache in her head as a way of trying to bypass the heavy, hot pains in her limbs and hips. She pretended, in those few moments before reality smashed its way through, that this was her dream – this place, this time, with these diseased, dead people wandering the airport as they searched for anyone they had missed. And it might have worked for longer than a second if Sean had not persisted.

  ‘Jayne? You awake? You okay? I said they’re still there.’ His voice became muffled, and she knew he had turned again to one of the aircraft’s dulled, scratched windows. ‘Some have gone, I think. Or maybe they’re just waiting somewhere out of sight. But lots of them are just . . . wandering. Like cattle.’

  Jayne opened her eyes at last and grimaced at the familiar pain. Soon she would have to start massaging her limbs and joints, give herself the gift of movement.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Couple hours,’ Sean said.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He shrugged, his back still turned towards her. She could see the window misting and clearing as he breathed, and she wanted to tell him to get back. But it was dark inside the cabin, and outside there was flickering, dreadful light.

  ‘Terminal’s still burning. Hour ago, a big passenger jet overflew the airport, real low, then headed north. A few minutes after that an F16 went back and forth a few times.’

  Jayne sat up slowly, wincing against the pain in her stiff limbs and joints. As she started massaging, the determination in Sean’s voice gave her a boost.

  ‘Did you speak to your daughter?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did your friend call back?’ she asked.

  ‘Leigh? Yeah.’ Sean paused.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he said he’d put a call in, and entered you on the immunity register. Help should be on its way.’

  ‘Should be?’

  Sean turned around at last, retreating from the window, and for a moment Jayne saw the glimmer of distant fires reflected against his skin.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be calling the police, or something?’ she asked. ‘Or . . . I don’t know, the army? Scientists?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ Sean said, shaking his head, ‘and—’

  From outside they heard the whoop of a police siren. Eyes wide, Sean glanced from Jayne to the window and back again.

  ‘Help?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe. But we have to be careful.’ He was still nursing the gun in his hand, and she wondered whether he’d closed his eyes even for a moment while she had been asleep. She felt very selfish. She had rested, mourning a love she knew was dead, and all the while Sean had watched over her, not knowing what had happened to his daughter.

  Jayne pushed herself upright and staggered across the aisle to the far seats. Sean grabbed her hand and eased her down, and they looked out of two adjoining windows. In the distance, past a series of boarding gates where several aircraft were parked, a blue light flashed three times. A siren whooped again, followed by three more flashes.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Looking for survivors, maybe?’

  ‘Or looking for us?’

  Below them, several shapes emerged from beneath the plane’s fuselage and headed across the wide span of concrete. One man walked quickly, almost with authority, but the splash of dried blood down the back of his white shirt was stark and black. The others followed at a slower pace, a couple of them hindered by the wounds that had changed them.

  ‘Hiding beneath us,’ Jayne said.

  ‘Sneaky bastards.’

  ‘Sneaky? You think they can sneak?
’

  Sean gave her a sidelong look and shrugged.

  ‘We should signal them,’ she said. ‘But we should warn—’

  ‘I doubt they need warning.’ He tensed for a moment, thinking. He chuckled. ‘Wish I could drive this thing.’

  ‘Wish I could fly this thing.’

  Sean nodded, still distracted. ‘Cabin lights,’ he said at last.

  ‘I’m sure there’s a master switch, but where?’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter.’ Sean reached for the overhead control panels, pushed buttons, and the weak reading lights flicked on.

  ‘Might as well light a match,’ Jayne said, watching from the window. She could make out two vehicles, one a police car and the other a larger truck. In the flickering light of the burning concourse, they looked white.

  Sean walked back and forth along the cabin, flicking on the lights.

  Something exploded in the blazing terminal, sending a column of fire and rolling black smoke skyward. Gouts of flame arced comet-like from the blast, and as they rained down they too started exploding in brief, incredibly bright bursts.

  ‘Gas canisters,’ Jayne said. ‘The cop car’s moving back.’ She heard Sean’s footsteps as he raced to switch on more lights and suddenly she felt incredibly exposed here in this contained space. The glare of the explosions and the subdued lighting behind her combined to blur her vision, and outside there could be any number of grim faces turning her way. They’ll see us now, she thought. Whether or not those cops are here for us – whether or not they see us – the zombies will know we’re here. This might have been their one safe place, but now it was compromised.

  ‘I think we have to get out,’ she said when Sean crouched by her side.