Coldbrook(43)

Gasping a sudden, shuddering sob, she turned up the radio and scanned it to a talk station.

‘. . . seven times, and they jus’ tell me “please hold on, we’re busy an’ try an’ call back later”, but the guy was standin’ there, starin’ in my window with his throat gone and . . .’

‘. . . ask the Lord for help and forgiveness, sinners, because the time has come to count your sins, stack them against the unbreachable wall of His limitless compassion, and if you don’t seize the moment and bow down now the tide of death will sweep over you, and you’ll die without Jesus in your heart . . .’

‘. . . they don’t die, and if these psycho Rapture dudes realised that they’d be running like the rest of us. They don’t die. I saw one hit by a truck and dragged two hundred feet under the wheels, and when the trucker got out and went to check, the roadkill reached up and dragged him down and bit him. They bite. That’s what I’ve heard. I’m telling you, they don’t die, and what’re the authorities doing about all this? Just what are they . . .?’

‘. . . confused right now, but there do seem to be isolated incidents of violence occurring at this time. The situation is under review, and all our resources are committed to investigating the cause of this violence and protecting members of the public from these few individuals who seem intent on . . .’

‘. . . and my neighbour called, black guy, and the cop asked if he was white, ’cos if he was white he could help him, and told him there’s no brothers when it comes to the end of time, only the Lord and his children. And my neighbour’s the best Christian I ever met, and that motherf*cker asked him if he was f*cking white!’


Jonah turned off the radio and closed his laptop screen, hiding the news site from view. The reports were sketchy, but there was no denying the proliferation of attacks. He didn’t need to hear any more because he knew it was out there in the world, and he was more responsible than that prick Pearson. Vic might have opened the way, but Jonah had welcomed it into the world. Maybe Bill really did know the risks in what we were doing. Jonah had read the old man’s diaries, witnessed the paranoia he’d been suffering before he died – he thought he was being watched, every minute of the day – but perhaps there was something more. Something he’d never been able to write down.

It didn’t really matter any more.

Jonah switched one of the screens to the single inner-core camera. He took a deep breath before looking, because what they had done danced along the fringes even of his understanding. He knew some of it, but not all, and he liked to tell people – financiers, employers, those who sought to question Coldbrook’s undertaking – that Coldbrook’s core was a sum of the minds and knowledge that had gone in to make it. But he had always known the truth. Bill Coldbrook had made the leaps of intuition to give them this, and then he had killed himself.

Bill’s comments about the Core had enthralled Jonah decades ago and they still did now. It sat behind eight feet of reinforced fifty-newton concrete, a foot of layered lead, six inches of steel, nine inches of graphite, and the largest Penning-trap network ever . . . and yet what was inside was a world away.

And Jonah opened his eyes to see.

The glow was both there – and not there. Staggering energies danced within flashes of quark-gluon plasma, countless collisions gave the core a sea of possibilities. It felt as though he was seeing with his own eyes and also remembering the view from someone else’s, when the core containment was still being constructed and the core itself remained a dream. It was an incredibly disturbing experience, and the first time he’d ever seen it he’d told Bill that he was seeing inside Schr?dinger’s box while the experiment was still under way. Bill had laughed, taken him to one side, poured a drink.

What he saw existed in a fold between realities. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. And he shut off the camera, remembering what Holly had said the one and only time she had looked. It’s like seeing into the mind of God.

‘He’s having a nightmare right now,’ Jonah muttered, and he stared at his list. There were the names of a dozen people, most of whom he had not seen for many years. He hoped they could all help. He flicked on the radio again as he started dialling, keeping it low, a background theme to his culpability.

‘. . . might well be a form of rabies. No one has yet been able to run tests, but from the descriptions that have come in – somewhat glorified and exaggerated, I suspect – it seems that the attacker is possessed by some kind of madness, and the victim is quickly infected. I believe one commentator has referred to them as . . . zombies? Well, let me tell you, science completely precludes . . .’

‘We need to stop and rest,’ Lucy said.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’ve been driving for hours.’

‘Really, I’m fine,’ Vic said. ‘Just a bit longer.’ Lucy had been scanning the radio, sometimes settling on a station playing sterile love songs, sometimes finding a news channel, occasionally encountering religious or talk shows where the theories were becoming more outrageous by the minute. Zombies, someone had said, and she’d snorted and scanned away. And, all the while, Vic had been absorbing the information and knowing for sure that it was ten times worse than anyone claimed.

He remembered a few years ago when the terrible earthquake had struck the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Haiti had been devastated, but for a long time the only firm news coming out of the country had been from individuals on blogs, independent radio stations and mobile phones. Confusion had reigned about how bad the quake had been and how many were affected, and even fly-bys by the US Coast Guard had given only a vague idea of the power and severity of the quake. It had taken almost twenty-four hours for outside agencies to penetrate to the affected zones, and another two weeks before the full, terrible human cost had been realised. At the time it had shocked him that, in a world so interconnected through the media and various forms of instant communication, a tragedy such as the quake could have caused such confusion for so long.