Coldbrook(105)

‘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.’