Coldbrook (Hammer)

by Tim Lebbon

  ‘It’s okay,’ Vic said, pressing his mouth to her ear.

  ‘There,’ Lucy said. ‘That plane down there, close to the grass verge. Furthest one. See it? Do you see?’

  ‘I see it,’ Marc said. ‘But what am I looking at’

  ‘Not the plane,’ Vic said, understanding at once. ‘Gary, take us lower.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ the pilot whispered. He had seen it as well.

  They hovered two hundred feet away, maybe a hundred feet off the ground, and countless eyes turned their way.

  ‘Must be a thousand of them down there,’ Vic said.

  They surrounded the aircraft, most of them motionless, a few sitting or lying down because of the damage done to their bodies. They all turned their heads to watch the helicopter, and some were now walking their way, a few of them running.

  Though they were well off the ground Gary took them a little higher.

  Vic saw a couple of battered police vehicles and noticed that one of those running at them was a big man wearing a torn uniform. His face had gone, replaced with a dark mask of dried blood.

  Olivia had pressed her face against Vic’s side and he held one hand to the side of her head, just in case she peeked. He wished someone would screen his eyes from the view as well.

  ‘They’re just waiting there,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Maybe they’ve got nowhere else to go,’ Gary suggested.

  ‘Or maybe they know that someone’s alive in there,’ Marc said. ‘Look!’ He pointed, and Vic saw the faint flicker of a weak light being turned on and off inside the plane. ‘Gary, any way we can signal them?’ Marc asked, and Gary swung the helicopter left and right three times.

  ‘Okay,’ Lucy said. ‘So.’

  Many of the shapes were below them now, looking but not reaching up, aware in some animal way that they could not touch the helicopter yet knowing that there were people inside. Vic could see their faces, devoid of emotion. He could see the dried blood. They were dead but walking, and they wanted to bite his family.

  ‘Fuck them,’ Vic said, his voice shaking. ‘Fuck them all. We put down and shoot them, and then get to the plane and—’

  ‘How many bullets do you think we have?’ Marc asked him, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

  Gary lifted them a little higher and swung in a circle around the besieged jet. The zombies watched.

  ‘What if we land a few hundred feet away?’ Vic said. ‘Sit there, wait for them to come at us. Then take off and land back here.’

  ‘No,’ Marc said. ‘We can’t assume that whoever’s inside will know what we’re doing. We don’t know if they’re hurt. And if it is the girl we’re after and she has been bitten . . .’

  ‘Are we just going to let her on board?’ Lucy asked. ‘Without checking?’

  ‘No,’ Vic said. ‘No way.’ He stared at Marc when the tall man looked back. He squeezed Olivia tighter.

  ‘Fine,’ Marc said. ‘Gary, got a rope or a ladder in this thing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Vic swallowed hard. What the fuck? But something had to be done. His legs ached from inaction, and his heart throbbed with the need to make amends. To Lucy and his daughter, for deeds unspoken; and to everyone else. I’d be dead if I’d stayed in Coldbrook, he thought, but ‘if’ was no defence.

  ‘Where is it?’ Vic asked.

  Vic sat in the helicopter’s open doorway, gripping the door’s handle with both hands while Gary manoeuvred closer and lower. Beneath them the hordes were stirring, some of them now even reaching up, unlike before, as though to snatch the helicopter from the sky.

  ‘This is as low as I go,’ Gary said in his earpiece, and Vic took a look down. They were hovering above the aircraft’s wide wing, and either side of the wing he could see what awaited him if he slipped and fell. The zombies’ hands, clawed and ready to rip and tear. Their open mouths, showing expression only with the bloodied teeth they contained. Marc was strapped safely into the seat beside him, ready to lean from the doorway and give him covering fire with his rifle. Shoot me if I fall, he wanted to say, but Lucy still had her headpiece on, sitting behind him in the cabin and shielding Olivia from the roaring, smoke-laden wind.

  ‘Won’t be long,’ he said instead, and he and Marc locked stares. Marc nodded once. Maybe he already knew what his responsibilities were.

  Vic kicked the coiled rope ladder from the door. It unfurled and landed on the wing, much of it still rolled up. He looked at the aircraft again, and at the faces watching from the window of the emergency door leading onto the wing. They looked as nervous as he felt.

  He turned around onto his belly and eased himself out of the door. As his feet found the ladder Lucy’s words surprised him, soft as a breeze in this storm.

  ‘Come back to us.’

  ‘Put the coffee on,’ he said, but he could not look at his wife and child again. Not until he was back.

  Vic started to climb down. When he was a kid he’d had a tree house in his grandparents’ garden. Something straight out of Huckleberry Finn, his grandfather had claimed, but Vic had always seen himself as Calvin and the tall childhood friend he hadn’t thought about in thirty years had been Hobbes. ‘If you could see me now,’ he said, and he wondered what had become of Hobbes and where he was. As kids, they had both negotiated the rope ladder up to the tree house with ease, and his grandfather had said that such a thing was like riding a bike. All about balance and confidence. But they hadn’t had a buffeting wind to contend with, nor a motor roaring so loud that the noise felt like a physical impact. And if they’d fallen there’d only have been cuts and bruises, and fallen leaves clinging to their clothes.

  Hand over hand, ever cautious, Vic descended from rung to rung. He glanced down when he thought he was almost there, to find he was only halfway down.

  ‘Bloody cold out here,’ he said, and he heard Marc laugh in his ear. But no one else replied. This action was all down to Vic, and keeping his concentration tightly focused was paramount. There could be no distractions.

  A gust of wind set him swaying. He clung on tight and closed his eyes, stomach lurching as he felt himself swinging through the air. He looked up again and saw Marc looking into the cabin, then back down at him.

  ‘Sorry!’ Gary said. ‘The fire’s whipping up a windstorm. Don’t want to hurry you, but—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Vic said. As he started down again Marc’s voice crackled through his earpiece.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Vic, you got trouble.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down. Look down.’

  Vic looked down. The drifting helicopter had dragged the rest of the ladder from the wing, and now it was unfurled all the way to the ground. And the things were already trying to climb up it.

  The first one was the tall cop, his face bitten off, teeth bared because he had no lips.

  ‘Hold on!’ Gary said. ‘I’ll swing around and—’

  ‘No time,’ Vic said softly. ‘Can’t risk them catching me. They’re not worried about dying.’

  ‘Oh, Vic,’ Lucy said, but he did not reply, did not even want to give voice to his despair. He had seconds, and every one of them had to count.

  He glanced up. Marc leaned out of the doorway, aiming the rifle down.

  ‘Vic, I can’t see past you.’

  ‘I’ve got it. Gary, hold that fucker still!’ He turned sideways to the ladder and threaded his left arm and right leg through, bending his elbow and grabbing a rung above him, pulling his knee around the rope, and tugging the gun from his belt with his right hand. It slipped in his palm, and he cried out as it almost fell from his grasp.

  ‘Fuck!’

  The faceless cop was a dozen rungs below him and scrambling up the rope ladder, hands and feet missing every third or fourth rung, one eye gone, the other bloodshot and burst, and Vic had no idea how he could see or sense anything.

  He clasped the gun tightly, aimed down at the cop’s bloody face and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  ‘Safety!’
Marc screamed in his ear, and Vic flipped the safety lever with his thumb and pulled the trigger again.

  The cop’s head flipped back and bits of it spattered down across the white wing below them. He held on for a few seconds, a woman in a bright floral dress tearing at his feet and trousers in her frenzy to get past him. Then he fell back into empty air and took her with him. They both struck the leading edge of the massive wing and spun into the manic crowd below.

  The rest of the ladder was clear.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Marc said. ‘Lucy, he’s fine. Fucking hell.’

  ‘Couldn’t put it better myself,’ Vic said. He hung there for a moment, not daring to move in case his thundering heart shook him from the ladder. He didn’t deserve to fall after marksmanship like that.

  Thirty seconds later he was on the wing, pulling the ladder back up before more of the zombies could climb it. And twenty feet away the emergency door in the fuselage swung open. He crouched down and aimed the gun, and the man who emerged held up his hands, displaying his own gun tucked into his belt.

  ‘You the sky marshal?’ Vic shouted.

  ‘Yeah. But who the hell are you?’

  ‘Wyatt Earp.’ The woman who emerged after the man grinned, glancing up at the hovering helicopter. ‘Wyatt Earp, that’s who he is. Come to restore justice to Zombie Town.’

  ‘Gotta admit, that was some shooting,’ the sky marshal said.

  Vic started shaking. He sat down heavily on the wing before enjoying the contact as the man and woman shook his hand and helped him up. He told them to go first because he had to pull himself together before climbing again. The two men watched the woman’s slow climb, and Vic was aware enough to notice the bandage on her arm.

  ‘She was really bitten?’ he asked.

  ‘She was,’ the other man said. ‘Seconds away from getting her brains bashed out by the passengers.’

  ‘And what happened to them?’

  The man heard him but didn’t answer. Neither did his expression change. He watched as the woman reached the top of the ladder and was helped into the helicopter before he spoke again.

  ‘That’s some girl,’ he said. ‘That really is some girl.’

  We’ll see, Vic thought. Then he pointed at the ladder, pleased that his hand was no longer shaking. ‘After you.’

  5

  They would have tried reaching Jonah by now. If his calls had made waves, then Coldbrook’s surface enclosures would be swarming with military, and they would have worked their way down to him with cutting equipment or explosives.

  So it was obvious that there was no one. He was alone down here with no knowledge of what was happening in the world above, and with the Inquisitor getting ready to turn him into one of his own. Ridiculous, and yet Jonah could not rationalise his way out of this understanding. He was being harried by something he could not explain.

  Control and the breach chamber were still barricaded with the furniture he had put back outside the compromised door. He started pulling it away, aware all the time of the weight of the gun in his belt. It seemed to do no good against the Inquisitor, but Jonah himself was still human flesh and blood. Alive or dead, he intended to stay that way.

  The Inquisitor was behind him, out of sight, somewhere in the darkened facility. He shone his heavy torch back along the corridor, but saw nothing. That only filled him with dread.

  You’ll live for ever, the Inquisitor had said, and Jonah couldn’t think of anything worse. These many years without Wendy had been bad enough; eternity without her was unthinkable.

  He pulled the last chair away, peered into the room and shone his torch around. Shadows stretched and shifted from behind the many control desks and terminals. Jonah entered Control and almost went to look at the corpse from the other Earth. But he did not have the luxury of time.

  ‘So there it is,’ he said, standing a dozen steps from the breach as he had so many times since its formation. It was night through there now, and what little of the landscape he could see was heavily shadowed. His heart was thudding, skipping a beat every now and then as it so often did nowadays. He held his hand to his chest. That bastard wanted to open me up.

  Holly had punched off the eradicator so that she could escape through, but Jonah had no idea whether it had been set on a time delay. And with power off there was no way to find out. The core, and therefore the breach and its associated containment and eradicator, was self-sustaining, but now impossible to assess.

  Something scraped against the floor. He wasn’t sure where the sound had come from or what had caused it, but he held his breath and listened for more. Nothing.

  ‘Time to get out of here,’ Jonah muttered, drawing the gun from his waistband. He was nowhere near prepared but he could stay no longer.

  He strode towards the breach, the threat of being killed by the eradicator a remote concern because he would feel nothing. His body would close down, his mind following soon after, and perhaps he would die thinking of Wendy and everything they had not had time to do together.

  As he was about to enter, hair standing on end and body tingling all over, he saw a shadow moving towards him. He raised the gun, heavy and comforting in his hand. Perhaps I’m seeing myself, he thought, because he had no idea what crossing between this world and another might do.

  Then the tip of a metal-and-wood device was pointing at him, a shape emerged behind it, and Holly said, ‘You can put can the gun down, Jonah.’

  ‘Holly!’ he gasped. She stood in the space between two Earths, edging forward, the crossbow pointing at his face. Behind her, only darkness.

  ‘Jonah?’

  He kept his gun trained on her, but he had almost forgotten about it in his surprise.

  ‘Holly, I . . .’

  She came forward from the breach, and Jonah could see that so much about her had changed. She was sweating, panting hard, grubby, wearing long shapeless clothes. And her eyes were wide and determined.

  ‘Gun, Jonah.’

  ‘Oh.’ He lowered the pistol and smiled, and then Holly’s eyes went wide.

  ‘I’m not one of—’ he said – and she fired.

  HollyshotmeHollyshotme! The bolt flew past the side of his head and he felt a brief draught as it whispered by. Then he heard an impact behind him and a startled exhalation, and as he spun around Holly was shouting, ‘What the fuck was that?’

  ‘What?’ Jonah felt a momentary queasiness, and the world tilted around him. Holly did not come to help him and he had to lean over and rest his hands on his knees. There was nothing moving in Control apart from a trace of mist.

  ‘That thing.’

  ‘There’s nothing—’

  ‘Weird guy behind you. Gone now.’ Her voice trembled a little, and at first he thought it was from fear. ‘Not one of them?’

  ‘The Inquisitor?’ Jonah asked, realising that Holly was afraid she’d shot someone else. ‘You saw it?’ But his rush of elation was quickly tempered by Holly’s expression.

  ‘Inquisitor.’ Holly blinked a few times, shock settling across her face. ‘Jesus help us. The Inquisitor? That’s what you called it?’

  ‘It’s what it calls itself.’

  ‘Oh, Jonah, we have so much to talk about.’

  ‘Through there,’ he said, pointing behind her.

  ‘No.’ She was loading a fresh bolt into the crossbow.

  ‘Yes!’ They had to leave here, because the freak had revealed himself to both of them.

  ‘No, Jonah. No way. They’re close.’ She looked behind her and, though he could see no shadows moving through there, Jonah could see that her fear was very real.

  ‘Who?’

  She pointed her crossbow at the first fury that had come through and started all this. ‘Like that,’ she said. ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jonah stepped closer to her. She smelled strange, but she was still his Holly.

  ‘Is there anywhere safe?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Holly’s face
fell. She leaned against Jonah, hugging him tight.

  ‘Oh, Jonah, what have we done?’

  He had a thousand questions for her – about the crossbow, her clothes, the smell, her knowledge, the things through there, what she had seen, what she had heard . . . But one most of all.

  ‘The Inquisitor,’ he said.

  ‘Drake mentioned it.’

  ‘Drake?’

  Holly pulled back, and her slight smile shocked him. ‘In a way, he’s their version of you.’

  Jonah froze. ‘Holly . . .’

  There were figures moving behind her, through the breach. The darkness throbbed and shifted, a pulsing riot of shadow that was drawing closer.

  ‘Might be the guards,’ Holly said, but there was doubt in her voice.

  ‘Guards?’

  Holly concentrated, peering through the breach, turning her head slightly left and right. She lifted the crossbow again, and it seemed such an unconscious gesture that Jonah wondered how much she had changed. When she’d gone through she had been a scientist, now . . . now she looked like someone out of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not the guards. Don’t know how time changes when . . .’ She grabbed Jonah’s arm and started for the door. ‘We have to get out of Control and lock it up, tight.’ She looked around the large room, and he knew what she was searching for.

  ‘It’ll come again,’ he said. ‘But . . . you hit it, and it went?’

  ‘I’m sure the bolt got it in the shoulder,’ Holly said. She shook her head, frowned. ‘Maybe it was a caster.’

  ‘Caster?’

  ‘Furies that don’t move, just observe. They watch through them.’

  ‘You know about them?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Come on. Out of here, then we’ve got some catching-up to do.’

  The breach was moving now, and through the hole between the two worlds Jonah could see limbs and shuffling bodies.

  ‘Power’s off all over?’ Holly asked.

  ‘And communications.’

  ‘You’re alone down here?’

  Jonah didn’t answer that, and the image of the Inquisitor rose up again.