Coldbrook(41)

—when she woke up her feet were kicking in the footwell, her arms thrashing at the seat, and she was trying to swim. She shouted out again in pain, crying herself fully awake. Her head thumped with the remnants of unconsciousness.

Jayne gasped and took several long, deep breaths. No one and nothing moved around her. Tommy was still there, and the little dead girl had gone. Across the car park lay another body, its face turned away from her. Breathing hard, afraid of another blackout, she searched for her mobile phone. When she found it she dialled 911 again.

Sorry, all our operators are busy with other calls, please stand by.

‘What the f*ck?’ Jayne muttered. She dialled again and got the same message. And again. Then she dialled Ellie’s landline and got her answerphone:

‘Hey, Ellie here, I’ve pissed off to my folks in Kentucky. No way I’m hanging around for this shit.’

Jayne cancelled the call, shaking her head and terrified of the falling darkness, dialled 911 one more time – and a woman answered.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m . . . something’s happened to . . .’ Jayne said, and the tears came. ‘Tommy.’

‘We’ll have someone with you soon.’ And the woman hung up.

Didn’t even ask my name or where I was. Jayne stared at the phone, expecting the woman to ring back, willing help to come and someone to tell her everything was going to be all right. But the phone remained silent.

She started the car and eased forward, pausing beside Tommy’s body. Shadows lurked beneath and around the other abandoned vehicles, cast there by the setting sun. Maybe the infected ones were watching with their empty eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Tommy,’ Jayne whispered. She tried to remember the last thing she’d heard him say, and the final words she’d said to him.

As she pulled away from the car park she turned on the radio, and soon she realised why all those operators were busy.





8


Jonah had to shoot four more of the afflicted in the head. Sometimes he downed them with the first shot, other times it went wide or struck their chest or neck, and he’d have to nerve himself to shoot again. Each time he pulled the trigger he closed his eyes.

On his laptop he’d worked his way through the facility, opening and closing doors using automatic controls, luring the dead things this way and that until he could lock them away. There were five in the big walk-in fridge in the canteen, three in the services plant room, and two in the gym. The last of the four – those who had surprised him, or who had not gone the way he’d hoped where doors opened or closed – had dashed at him from a bathroom he’d believed to be locked down, and his instinct saved him. He was sure that if he’d had time to think about what was happening, realise what he was doing, then he would have missed. One of them was Ashleigh – she had been an archivist responsible for the storage and duplication of all Coldbrook’s records – and he had shot her in the eye.

Jonah dragged each body to the accommodation room nearest to where he’d shot them, and locked them inside.

He’d been keeping a count of each one he’d locked away or put down. He was up to eighteen. With Holly and Vic gone, that left nine people unaccounted for. Some had escaped up the ventilation duct – he knew that for sure – but he had no idea how many. Not nine, he hoped. And yet the fewer that had made it up there, the more remained down here with him.

No one had emerged at the sounds of gunfire and made themselves known. The hope persisted that some were hiding themselves away, and there were still those three closed doors in an accommodation wing. He had passed them by, and perhaps soon he would think about opening them. Perhaps.

Because Jonah thought he might have gone insane. What if I’m doing this for real? he’d thought as he stalked corridors and shot down shadows. What if I’ve lost my marbles, and picked up a gun, and tomorrow I’ll be an item on the news, just another gun massacre that would fade into obscurity for all but those affected? Madness had been an intriguing idea, and every time he pulled the trigger and opened his eyes again, he’d look carefully for any change in the zombies’ faces, any glimpse that there was terror hiding behind the facades he had brought into being. But the empty eyes persisted, and when those afflicted were put down the only change was that the eyes no longer moved.

The change he did notice was purely physical – the brains remained wet. While the blood from their non-cranial wounds soon coagulated, tacky and drying, the mess blown from their skulls was still rich with blood. This made no sense if their hearts stopped, but Jonah supposed that blood might sit in the brain for a while, kept fresh and heavy with infection, and the drive to spread the disease lived with it. The infection killed them, and then took over their brains. Could impulses pass along blood-denuded nerves? He thought not, and yet he could see no other way for them to remain moving.

He would not let a supernatural explanation even suggest itself to him. He could not. There was a process here, and he had already worked out how to end it. Discovering more was essential.

Thinking through the science of a zombie actually settled his nerves a little. As he considered venturing to his room to retrieve the remaining Penderyn whisky, Jonah switched on the radio.

‘. . . found dead beside the road, and a further five bodies were discovered in the camper van. A police source who does not wish to be identified said the bodies were “heavily mutilated about the head”. Elsewhere, a Scout troop is missing in the mountains north-east of Asheville. The Scouts were due home at midday, but with no communication from them since early morning concern is increasing, and parents are demanding a search-and-rescue. And in Bryson City rumours are rife of an army of “shambling ghosts” seen crossing the hillsides towards the township. More on these stories—’