Coldbrook(103)

‘Oh, hey,’ Marc said, and even through the electronic crackle she could hear the shame in his voice. ‘I meant nothing, Jayne.’

‘I got a question,’ Sean said. ‘What the f*ck is going on? And that’s just for starters. To follow that one up, what the f*ck is a “breach”? And who is on the other side? Is this a war?’

‘The man said “f*ck”,’ the little girl said, opening her eyes, and Jayne couldn’t hold back a laugh. Her mother quickly plucked the headphones from her daughter’s ears and hugged her.

‘Vic, you want to give them the quick version?’ Marc said.

‘Well . . .’ Vic said, and he glanced nervously between Jayne and Sean. She tried to sit up straighter, then actually cried out in pain as her hips flared in agony, and growled against the fire searing through her veins.

Vic’s wife let out a startled cry.

‘Hey, no, I was like this long before I was bitten,’ Jayne said, remembering the passengers on the plane – their fear, their pack mentality. This was a much smaller aircraft, with nowhere to run. ‘I have a disease called churu. It’s not contagious, and—’

‘Churu?’ Marc said. ‘You have that?’

‘Since birth. It sucks.’

‘I’ll bet,’ he said, thoughtful. ‘Tell them, Vic. Then Jayne and I need to talk.’

‘Zombies are a disease, and I’m the cure, is that it?’ she asked, only half joking. Nobody laughed.

‘Well, here’s the idiot’s guide,’ Vic said. ‘Coldbrook is a big experimental complex built beneath the Appalachians.’

‘Very James Bond,’ Sean said.

‘My boss Jonah Jones has been there since it began over twenty years ago, and he’s been running it for ten, trying to create a path between this world and another. Across the multiverse. Find an alternate Earth.’

‘I take it back,’ Sean said. ‘It’s Stargate.’

‘It’s neither,’ Vic said defensively. ‘It’s the most important scientific experiment for decades. It’s SETI, with proper funding. It’s the Large Hadron Collider, five steps on.’

‘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 f*cker 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.’