Coldbrook (Hammer)

by Tim Lebbon

  ‘Then why haven’t I heard of it?’ Sean asked.

  ‘You read the scientific journals regularly?’ Vic asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘It went wrong?’ Jayne asked.

  ‘No,’ Vic said. ‘It went right. More right than we ever really hoped. Jonah’s the genius, I’m just an engineer and the science is sometimes beyond me. But the concept of what we were doing set my imagination on fire. And, a week ago, we did it. We formed a breach across the multiverse, between this Earth and another.’

  ‘This came through,’ Sean said.

  ‘And it spread.’

  ‘Were there no safeguards?’ Jayne asked, amazed, terrified. ‘I mean . . . when they first brought back rocks and stuff from the moon, you know? They kept it all locked away. Isolated.’

  ‘There were safeguards,’ Vic said. He glanced at his wife and daughter, and his wife looked down into her lap. ‘I made a mistake – and it’s out because of me.’

  Jayne closed her eyes and the first thing she saw was Tommy’s head changing shape as the bullet hit him.

  ‘So now . . .’ Sean said, and his voice sounded hollow.

  ‘Now we have to try and stop it,’ Marc said. ‘It’s spreading incredibly quickly.’

  ‘How come?’ Sean asked. His voice was softer now. Angry. Jayne felt his heart racing.

  ‘It’s no normal disease,’ Marc said. ‘That’s a given, but this fucker is different from anything I can think of. Think of a common cold, spread by airborne particles and contact contagion – rub your nose, open a door, next person who touches the handle can pick it up. Now move that one step on – everyone with the cold does everything they can to spread it. That’s this disease. It’s active, not passive. It doesn’t sit there and wait to be spread, it spreads itself. And infection is instant.’ He fell silent, and Jayne could almost hear him thinking.

  ‘Except with me,’ Jayne said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘Except with you. So tell me about your churu.’

  ‘You sound as if you know it.’

  ‘I’m a phorologist, but before I specialised I did my thesis on rare conditions like yours.’

  Jayne told him. About how she’d had the condition ever since she could remember, and when she was a child it had been an inconvenience more than anything – sore feet when she ran too much, aching limbs in the mornings. About how when she hit puberty it grew a hundred times worse, and ever since then she’d lived with the joint pains, the headaches and intermittent churu comas, the daily massages. She said more than she’d told Sean during the hours when they’d been stranded on the jet but held back the tears, because she had defeated self-pity years ago.

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ Marc said. ‘So far there’s no confirmation of anyone else surviving a bite, anywhere. If you’re bitten, and the skin breaks, that’s it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Jayne asked. ‘That you can make a cure from my blood?’

  ‘A cure?’ Marc shrugged, averting his gaze. ‘It takes years to develop vaccines. But we don’t have years, or even weeks. We have days.’

  ‘I see,’ Jayne said. ‘So I’ll be experimented upon.’

  ‘Never without your permission,’ Marc said, and she could hear the strength in his voice. He was the man in charge here and she was glad for that. He sounded like someone she could trust.

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ she said, wincing when she tried to smile. ‘I like good beer. Imported, preferably British ale.’

  Marc chuckled, and the others smiled. It seemed to light up the cabin brighter than daylight ever could.

  4

  ‘We believe the Inquisitors favour the geniuses, and the depressives,’ Drake said.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  The tall man smiled, but the expression did not reach his eyes. ‘Years of study and guesswork. Kathryn Coldbrook disappeared from sight. I believe that, to accept such a fate, the victim must be without hope.’

  ‘That’s why it shows me the fates of worlds,’ Jonah said, understanding at last.

  He felt the immensity of time, space, and reality, and recognised his own size and worth among it all. He was a short-lived animal in the ever-evolving, ever-expanding actuality of the multiverse, a speck of sand on a world where time had reduced everything to sand. He had always done his best. But however much he had done, and however much he still had left to do, he was nothing compared to this.

  Nothing, in the face of the truth before him now. Here was a pathway from one universe to another, and it existed not because of him and his work but because all realities combined had sought it – and allowed it.

  He could not even claim to have found the way. It was always meant to be.

  ‘Oh, fuck my old boots,’ Jonah muttered.

  He and Drake walked forward and entered the breach together.

  Jonah tried to breathe, but he found no air.

  He walked and his senses worked, but he felt removed from his body – a consciousness hitching a ride in something mindless and soulless. It was a shocking sensation, because for a moment that might have stretched into years he saw himself as a fury, an automaton without thought or feeling. Then Wendy was with him, changing his mind, telling him that he was wrong and that he was an animal, a beautiful, genius animal with a precious mind and memories that were always, always his. He remembered her saying that on his fortieth birthday when they had picnicked together at the top of the Sugarloaf mountain in South Wales, watching families gasping and sweating as they completed their climb, and dogs panting, and Wendy had poured him another glass of wine. He walked on and his father came through the front door, his skin blue from impacted coal dust, his eyes red and his face lined with years of hard graft. He ruffled Jonah’s hair and never once looked back to check that his son was following him into their small back garden, because he always followed. Jonah’s mother brought his father a huge mug of tea and sat with him for a while, and neither of them spoke. That had been the day when four of his friends had died down the mine.

  More memories flowed together like a dream, senseless and yet meaning everything to Jonah. His grandmother told him to do ‘a good lot’ when he went to school – her way of saying work hard – and he’d spent his whole life trying to do a good lot. He hoped that she would have been proud. His friend Bill Coldbrook raced over the edge of a ridge on his mountain bike, screaming with glee as he rocketed out of control downhill, his long hair swishing behind him, and Jonah could only follow, aghast at the flippant way in which Coldbrook put his genius mind in danger. It was only as they reached the valley floor that he realised that genius could stagnate – and how to keep it alive.

  He would have gasped if he’d had any breath, and as he was drawn on he felt a tug coming from behind him, a gravity exerted on every atom of his body and tying him to every other part of his universe. This is where it’s all wrong. The wrench gave way and he felt the pull of the new world, and realised that what they had done should never have been allowed. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. There were consequences to removing himself from one universe and entering another. The look in Drake’s eye, a startled bird taking flight from the other side of a small stream – these were immediate effects of his arrival in this new place. And he could breathe again. But perhaps his intrusion would echo on. Maybe, in a billion years, stars would twist into the bellies of black holes because of him and galaxies would collide. He was the butterfly, and the multiverse his hurricane.

  Jonah went to his knees and drove his fingers deep into the soil of this whole new world.

  Drake had released his hand at some point, though Jonah felt as if someone was still grasping him. He looked at his right hand, pressed to the damp grass, fingers curled into the soil, and he felt the warm presence of another.

  ‘Jonah, stand up,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve got so much to show you.’

  Jonah stood, and several people who were standing around him took three steps back. To begin with he thought they were scared, but they w
ere smiling softly, and one of them – a short woman, with dyed purple clothing – nodded a greeting.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. He breathed in and smelled heather and the subtle perfume of unfamiliar flowers, and beyond the gurgle of the stream all he could hear was the soft whisper of a breeze through the shallow valley. The sky was a startling red, and he glanced at his watch to see how long past dawn it must be. But the watch’s hands had stopped.

  ‘Just past noon,’ Drake said.

  Jonah turned and saw a pile of beheaded furies’ bodies stacked a hundred feet away from the breach. A couple of people were piling wood around the heap’s base, preparing a bonfire. There were plants close to the stream that seemed to be propped on three stems instead of one. They looked alien and elegant. He looked up.

  ‘The sky,’ Jonah said.

  ‘Dust,’ Drake said. ‘Final solution. They nuked New York first, then Washington, then the West Coast.’ He shrugged, stretching. ‘Europe, too.’

  ‘Bombs against that?’ Jonah asked, looking at the stacked bodies once again.

  ‘Nothing else had worked,’ Drake said. ‘I’m not sure I can blame them.’

  ‘What about fallout?’

  ‘Levels can still be high, if the wind’s in the wrong direction. But the bombing was quite limited. They soon realised it was useless.’

  Drake signalled to one of the guards with a series of bizarre finger gestures. Jonah was just about to ask about the sign language when Drake held a finger to his lips.

  ‘From here to the facility, we move in complete silence,’ he said softly. ‘They can scent us but they home in on sound as well.’

  They set off and as Jonah walked he looked at a sky made beautiful by the dust of destruction.

  In Coldbrook they took him down to stare at something monstrous.

  ‘This isn’t what you said you were going to show me.’

  ‘Yet it’s something I thought you should see.’

  They had walked across Gaia’s strange yet familiar landscape, and though Jonah itched with questions he had obeyed Drake’s instruction to remain silent, observing with an intense excitement the variety of flora and fauna, and the distant hills hiding valleys that might contain anything.

  Now, in the depths of Drake’s Coldbrook, he looked at something that did not belong in this – or any other – world.

  ‘Kathryn Coldbrook ordered it retained,’ Drake said. ‘My father said she believed some cure could be created from the thing that came through and infected our world. The first vector. Then she disappeared, and everything died, and it’s been here ever since.’

  ‘And you’ve been experimenting on it?’ Jonah asked, horrified.

  ‘Not for decades,’ Drake said. ‘The few efforts we can still make, we concentrate on Mannan.’

  It was chained to a wall, a manacle around each wrist and ankle. They were tightened around bones, not skin and flesh. There was another restraint around its neck, screwed securely around its spine. Dried skin and flesh hung around the rusty iron like some sort of grotesque plant growth. Three sets of iron gates and a scratched glass screen locked it in, but somehow it could still sense them standing just inside the large cell’s door.

  ‘How can you live here with this in the same place?’

  ‘Most people have forgotten about it. And . . . we keep others.’

  ‘But not like this?’

  ‘No, not like this.’ Drake sounded almost respectful. ‘This one is unique.’

  Locked away for forty years, infected on another Earth before that, whoever it had once been was long since gone. But the physical aspect of its heritage was still visible.

  And it was not quite human.

  It had a heavy brow, and what little hair remained was long and black. Its face projected forward, like an ape’s. The arms were long and the hands large. It looked mummified – skin tight and shiny across some bones, but hanging loose across its stomach and chest – and its eyes were shrunken and deep.

  It jerked forward when it sensed their presence, drawing in its legs and arms where it sat like a dying spider. The chains clanked and dust fell from them; they had not moved for some time. Even though it was badly desiccated, Jonah could see signs of mutilation from those early experiments. An opening had been cut into its skull, and he saw the shadowy insides – the brain was still wet. The flesh had been scoured from one forearm. There were holes in its chest, one of which he was sure he could see through.

  ‘Horrible,’ he said.

  ‘I just see pathetic,’ Drake said. ‘It’s a dried-up old thing, victim of the Inquisitor’s kind.’

  ‘Then why not put it down?’

  ‘You talk as if it’s a suffering animal,’ Drake said, surprised. ‘It’s nothing like that. It was dead before it came through and doomed my world. Why put down something that’s already dead?’

  Jonah looked at his counterpart and saw a strong, determined man. But Drake was also someone who had been living in the aftermath all his life, scratching and surviving amid the rubble of his dead civilisation. If he was harsh, it was because that was all he had.

  ‘In our world, they were Neanderthals,’ Jonah said, turning his back on the horrible thing.

  ‘Ours also,’ Drake agreed. ‘It seems that they didn’t die out on every Earth. Another reason why the Inquisitors have to be defeated, and destroyed. They’ll kill anything that isn’t them. It’s worse than genocide. Not the extermination of a people, but an entire species. A reality. And if they finally succeed—’

  ‘They’ll never succeed.’

  ‘Why not?’ Drake asked.

  ‘Because the multiverse is infinite.’

  ‘Then they’ll commit infinite evil, and cause infinite pain, because they can never stop. Infinite Earths that might never breach without their help will be exposed to . . .’ Drake nodded at the wretched animate corpse.

  ‘There must be a way,’ Jonah said. ‘With that bastard stalking me.’ He looked around, away from the trapped dead thing and back out into the narrow tunnel beyond. He hadn’t seen the Inquisitor since coming through, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Sometimes when he blinked it was watching him, standing behind the operating table with the objects it wanted to graft onto Jonah. Just waiting for him to accept his fate.

  ‘There might be,’ Drake said, his voice sad once again, hesitant.

  ‘How? You think you have a way?’

  ‘First, I can show you more of what is out there. You want to see?’

  ‘No,’ Jonah said. ‘But I must.’

  ‘My wife, Paloma,’ Drake said, introducing Jonah to a tall, thin woman. ‘She’s our doctor. She will work with Marc when he arrives.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Jonah said, extending his hand. Paloma glanced at it and smiled uncertainly. Drake went to her side and hugged her, then whispered something in her ear. Her eyes went wide and she averted her gaze from Jonah, trying to appear less shocked than she was.

  ‘Something I should know?’ Jonah asked. Drake was guiding him here, choosing what he should hear and know, and that was a level of control no one had ever had over Jonah. He bristled, but also felt something like a child. They might be survivors barely scraping an existence, but something about Drake’s world was far ahead of Jonah’s.

  ‘I’m telling her about Jayne,’ Drake said, not looking at Jonah.

  ‘Good,’ Jonah said. ‘Hopefully she and Marc—’

  ‘Yes,’ Drake said. ‘So, casting library. This way.’ And he left the room, expecting Jonah to follow. Paloma remained looking at the floor, and Jonah walked closer to her than he had to, hoping that she would glance up. But she did not. Dead man walking, he thought, not sure where the words had come from.

  He followed Drake. They passed through a series of doors, and then Drake paused at a doorway, put his finger to his lips and nodded inside. ‘Casting room,’ he whispered as Jonah drew close. ‘This will upset you.’

  And how right Drake was. For a second Jonah wa
s amazed at the technology behind what he was seeing, and a hundred questions occurred to him all at once. But then he realised what was being displayed on the screens hanging above the prone people, and such petty queries fled.

  He saw his world in flames and turmoil. Burning cities, rivers of bodies, masses of humanity no longer human.

  ‘Enough,’ Jonah said, turning away. He met Drake’s gaze. What he’d just seen was more terrible than the visions shown him by the Inquisitor, because this was his Earth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Drake said.

  Jonah was going to reply, and then he saw a shape moving along the corridor., dragging a familiar shadow. It can’t be. I’m a universe away! But the Inquisitor was there, those horrible objects dangling from its hand. They swung like heavy wet organs removed from another body. They dripped.

  One of the Inquisitor’s shoulders was bleeding, the blood looking surprisingly fresh against the old, dusty robes. Holly shot him with her crossbow, Jonah thought, and that gave him a brief burst of confidence. ‘I do not accept,’ he said hoarsely, and the Inquisitor faded away.

  ‘It was here?’ Drake said softly, his tone full of wonder and dread. He grabbed Jonah’s arm and pulled him away from the casting room, back along the corridor to a narrow doorway. ‘We don’t have long.’

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘Because the Inquisitor won’t wait for ever for you to accept. Kathryn’s diaries said as much. It’s dancing with me when I don’t want to be its partner. And yet this game must have an end. She found her end, Jonah. And unless we hurry, you’ll find yours as well.’

  ‘You have a plan to deny him?’

  ‘Trust me. We’re like brothers. You’re your Earth’s me, do you not see that? Don’t you feel it?’

  Jonah nodded, and made the decision to trust this man. He had little choice, and behind Drake’s apparent arrogance was a self-confidence that Jonah had to respect. Any genius had an ego; he only hoped that Drake’s was justified.

  They entered a new room and Drake flicked on several lights. ‘We have to destroy them. You see that?’