Coldbrook(12)

‘What came through?’ Vic asked again, cursing the continuing alarm that stole some of his words.

‘Don’t know . . . a creature, but . . .’ Gasping, coughing.

‘Where’s Holly?’

‘Control.’ Vic stared at the narrow cot where he and Holly had made love so many times, felt her breath on his neck and her fists squeezing his shoulders as she came, and his sister’s voice echoed from his dream. Right, yeah. At work.

‘How did something get past the—?’

‘Vic, it attacked Melinda.’

‘What? How?’

‘Bit her. Bad. But then she . . . I thought she was dead, but she . . .’

‘Jonah?’

‘Need to control this until we can . . .’ He was panting harder now, each breath a gasp. ‘. . . can figure out . . .’

‘Is Holly safe?’

‘Don’t know. Meet me in Secondary.’

‘Okay.’ And before he could say anything else Jonah signed off. Vic stared at the satphone for a few seconds as if expecting it to buzz into life again.

He snapped up his palmtop computer, patched into the wireless network and then accessed the facility’s remote cameras. It took two attempts to enter the correct password, and for a panicked moment he feared that some security-conscious employee had changed it. But then the thumbnail images sprang up, and he scrolled across to Control.

Even before maximising the image, he could see how bad it was.

Control was in chaos. Someone was shooting, the gunfire somehow seeming even more violent without sound. Blood was splashed across the floor, pooled around a prone shape.

Vic gasped, looked for Holly, brought the palmtop closer to his face. But he couldn’t make anyone out.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Something came through and Vic couldn’t see what that something might be. Whatever it was, it had brought death.

Shaking, he dropped the palmtop face-down on the bed and dialled the first few numbers of his home landline. He paused, cancelled. It was four a.m. If he told Lucy that something was wrong, she might panic and let it slip to someone else. And he needed his family exactly where they were.

He paced his room, uncertain, clasping the phone, glancing again at the palmtop. Something came through, something attacked, and Holly was somewhere in there. His family would be asleep, Lucy lonely in the marital bed he had betrayed so much. His long-dead sister was right, he had told Holly that he loved her. But it was an illicit love, passion-driven, and nothing compared to what he felt for his family.

Vic was shaking.

As he blinked, he saw Lucy’s expression in his dream as Charlotte spewed out the sordid truth. The suspicion that existed in nightmare, and which perhaps he’d spied several times in the years since the affair had ended.

In the echo of Jonah’s gasping, panicked words, duty called. But Vic could only heed a far greater duty.

Panting, he dragged the gun box from beneath his bed and clicked though the numbers on the coded lock. The M1911 pistol went into his belt, along with three extra magazines. He hadn’t fired it for almost a year, when he’d hiked to a range high in the Appalachians to see how stale his shooting had become. He’d still been pretty good. Holding the pistol, feeling the rough grip, smelling the gun oil: it felt like a statement of intent.

The siren screeched again and again, and it could only be turned off from Control or Secondary. Jonah hadn’t reached Secondary yet, though it must only be a matter of seconds. And in Control, perhaps they were too busy.

‘Holly,’ he said out loud, and he thought back to the last time he’d spoken her name in this room. She hadn’t been here since the evening they ended their affair, when they’d sat together for half a night and had drunk three bottles of wine. Holly, you’re too special for me to lose, he’d said, and if we carry on I will lose you.

But your family are more special, she’d said. And she understood fully, she really did. That was why he still loved her. The sex was no longer there, but the friendship was priceless. Vic hoped that, if she was still alive, she would understand what he had to do now.

He had to abandon her.

‘Control’s locked down, can’t get in anyway,’ he whispered, justifying this new betrayal, thinking of the silent image of blood and shooting. ‘Whatever came through is trapped.’ And despite trying to convince himself that was true, his need to get his family as far away from here as possible was so pressing that it made him dizzy. Because he had always been afraid that something terrible might happen, and there was no telling what had just been released.

Vic left his room and slammed the door. At the junction, he looked left at where the corridor curved around towards the staircase leading down to Control and up to Secondary, and right at where it dog-legged away from the core and towards the common room and garage. He hesitated for only a second, and then turned right.

With every step he ran further from his professional responsibilities and the alarm screamed at his betrayal.





6


Alex shot Melinda five times. She fell back still biting, and the guard captain yelled as her teeth tugged away part of his face. She flipped onto her back and writhed for a second, bloody hands shoving at the motionless intruder from beyond the breach, and Holly thought, That’s it, she’s dead now, I’m sure I saw her spine—