Coldbrook(10)

Gunfire erupted again, several short bursts from two weapons, and when Holly opened her eyes she looked directly up at Jonah. He was still pressed against the window, his face slack. He looked from her to Melinda and back again, and Holly wanted so much to tell him that it wasn’t his fault.

Protocol dictated that Control must now remain sealed for three days. All functions would be transferred to Secondary, a room two floors up on Coldbrook’s top level that had full audio and visual access to Control and the breach, and from where Jonah and the others would be able to monitor what happened. And however appalled and guilty Jonah looked, Holly knew that he would follow protocol.

The gunfire ceased, and for a moment Holly could not turn around because she was terrified of what she would see.

‘Ohshitohshitohshit,’ Satpal said. She glanced sidelong at him, saw his hands pressed to his face, fingertips trying to massage the truth from his mind. He looked at her and his expression did not change.

She turned around. The man was slumped on top of Melinda, unmoving. Part of his head had been blown away. There was blood splashed across the concrete floor, and bullet holes pocked the framing around the breach. Did we shoot into there? she thought, and she looked everywhere but at Melinda, because she didn’t want to see. Though the man bore terrible wounds, only his ruptured skull seemed to bleed.

The two guards with the table used it to shove the dead intruder to one side. Holly heard him hit the floor, a sibilant sound like something dry, not wet. His head looked like a ruined coconut.

‘What do we do?’ one of the guards asked. ‘Do we . . .?’

‘Not sure there’s much point,’ Alex said. ‘She’s already stopped moving.’

Oh no, Holly thought, and she looked directly at the biologist for the first time. The man had made a mess of her, and from twenty feet away she was glad she could not make out the details. Melinda’s face had vanished in a mess of meat, her throat had been ripped out, and the pool of blood beneath her was spreading.

‘Holly!’ Jonah’s electronic voice said. He was using the intercom. There was a button on Holly’s desk, but right now she didn’t know what she could say. Melinda was dead. Blood still trickled from her ravaged throat, but it no longer flowed because her heart had stopped.

‘Miss Wright,’ Alex said, ‘we need to see if anything else is coming through, check the status of the—’

‘Okay!’ Holly said, pleased to have something to do. She sat at her station and looked at the large high-definition viewing screen to her left. She used her computer keyboard to run through all eighteen views available to her and, when she was confident there was nothing large moving over there, she set about checking the breach containment. All appeared well. The eradicator was back to full charge, sensors were all online, and the robot pods were fired up to collect anything.

But the man had still come through.

We’ve got to shut it down, she thought. Seal the breach and . . .

But that was something for Jonah to decide. And it was nowhere near as easy as simply closing a door.

‘Looks clear,’ Holly said, and when she looked up Alex was already moving forward. The other three guards covered him. He shouldered his gun and stepped into the puddle of blood. His boots made a slight splash in the congealing fluid and sluggish blood flowed in to fill his footprints. He edged around the dead man and skirted Melinda’s head, approaching from the other side, checking his men’s field of fire and squatting beside her.

Melinda groaned.

‘She’s alive!’ Holly said. ‘She’s alive?’ She spun around and looked up at Jonah, already seeing the hopelessness in his expression. He’ll still have to leave us in here, she thought.

‘But she can’t be . . .’ Satpal said. And Holly turned around again, because something about his voice seemed so sure.

Alex was still squatting beside Melinda, both hands held out as if unsure if or where he should touch her. She was moving slightly, groaning, limbs flexing, and when her face turned towards Holly she realised what Satpal had meant. She was all raw meat and teeth.

‘Get me some dressings!’ Alex snapped. One of his men dashed to the guard station by the main door.

‘Is it just—?’ Satpal said, and then Melinda sat up.

‘Just what?’ Holly asked.

A soft, ghostly sound filled the room, like a breeze blowing through weathered rocks.

Alex was looking at the biologist in amazement. He was still holding his hands out to either side, not wanting to touch her anywhere, when she grabbed his head, pulled it towards her face – and bit him.





5


Vic Pearson dreams of his dead sister. It is the worst kind of nightmare, one where he knows what is to come but cannot wake up or change its course. And in the waking hours to follow, he will think that quite appropriate. Charlotte’s real life had gone the same way, with him as a passive but supportive observer, unable to nudge her from the track of self-destruction that had finally taken her from him. He’d loved her and hated her, but in the nightmare she terrifies him.

Charlotte died at nineteen, but in the dream she, like Vic, is in her forties. She has hair greying at the temples and a face pinched by her troubled life. Stone-cross gravestones have been tattooed onto her forearms by blunt, infected needles, and he follows her through their Boston suburb as she goes from house to house, gathering the paraphernalia of her demise from people who should know better. At one house their mother opens the door and hands Charlotte a family heirloom to sell for drugs, and as Charlotte walks away without saying thank you Vic rages at his mother, shouting. But he has no voice – she does not hear. She averts her eyes and closes the front door on the smell of baking and despair. At the next house, Charlotte’s teenaged school friend answers the door and starts nodding, agreeing with every mad thing that Charlotte says. Satisfied, she walks on to the next house, and the next, and each time Vic tries to plead with the person who answers the door to make a stand against his sister’s downward spiral.