Coldbrook(50)

‘Sure you can! One of them is called Olivia, and I’m sure she’ll love you.’

‘You’re just joking!’ Olivia said through her laughter.

Marc pulled a face. ‘You got me. I’m joking. She’s actually called Lady. But I’m not joking when I say she’ll love you.’

He looked up at Vic and Lucy, glancing back and forth as if sizing them up.

‘Jonah said—’ Vic began, and Marc cut him off.

‘You okay to drive?’ he asked Lucy.

‘Sure.’

‘Cool. Ride with me, Vic. Need to fill you in on a few things. My place is five miles up into the hills, and I want to get there by nightfall.’

‘Why?’ Olivia asked.

‘Because,’ Marc said, leaning in close to the little girl and putting on a spooky voice, ‘that’s when the monsters come out!’

‘Monsters? Like zombies?’

Marc stood again, staring down at Olivia from his great height. Then he turned and opened his car door. ‘Come on. Light’s wasting.’

‘Lady rabbit awaits,’ Vic said to Lucy, and he kissed his little girl before climbing in beside Marc.

The tall man drove in silence for a while. Vic positioned his wing mirror so that he could keep an eye on Lucy behind them, then he glanced several times at Marc. In profile he presented an intimidating picture – sharp nose, sloping forehead, bald head, lush beard, cigarette smoking in the corner of his mouth. His arms were long, his hands big. He might have been a wrestler or a boxer, rather than what he was. In any other circumstance but this, Vic might have felt comforted by his presence.

‘That old Welsh bastard really asked you to kill me?’ Vic asked, only half-joking.

Marc turned to look at him, staring for so long that Vic wanted to shout, Don’t forget you’re driving!

‘You have a nice family,’ Marc said. ‘Your daughter is delightful. Your wife’s pretty, but sad.’

Vic sighed and looked out of the passenger window. The RAV4 was following close behind and he wished he was still with them, singing with Olivia and holding Lucy’s hand.

Marc reached over into the back seat while still driving, rooting around for something. ‘Here. Thought I should show you this.’ He dropped an iPad into Vic’s lap and Vic winced when the corner dug into his groin.

‘What’s this?’

‘Open it, access the net. I’ll give you the website to look at.’ Vic did what he was told, then Marc read out a series of numbers and letters forming a website address. After that, a user ID and password.

‘What am I looking at?’ Vic asked.

‘Something you shouldn’t be.’

‘Whatever Jonah told you—’

‘Is true. I’ve known that man for over forty years. How old are you?’

‘Forty,’ Vic said.

‘Fucking kid. Listen here, Vic. I’m going to do the best I can, and you’re going to help me. But what Jonah told me . . . I can’t just forget that. Can’t forget what a f*cking stupid prick you were, wrecking every safeguard built into that place. Can’t forget what a selfish motherf*cker you were, leaving them down there and escaping to save your own damn skin. I’m supposed to be working with you – it’s good that I know what a clumsy f*cker you are.’

‘You don’t sound French,’ Vic said after a pause. The man intimidated the hell out of him, but he wanted to present some attitude, stand his ground. He was doing enough beating himself up as it was, without taking it from someone else as well.

‘Mother was from Quebec.’ Marc reached over and tapped the screen. ‘Now look. You got some catching up to do.’

Vic looked. The page was laid out in thumbnails, each with a brief description underneath. He clicked on the first, and watched.

Over the next fifteen minutes, while Marc drove and smoked silently and Lucy followed on behind, Vic watched a selection of videos that displayed just how bad things had become. They seemed to have been taken from many sources: hand-held hi-def video cameras; mobile-phone footage; images taken from press sites and news programmes; aerial views, probably from police or military choppers; and several videos that looked as though they’d been taken by a soldier’s gun-or helmet-mounted camera.

‘What is this site?’ Vic asked halfway through. He’d just watched a group of raging, blood-soaked people swept from a roadway by a huge truck with a cattle guard on the front, and then a dozen men machine-gunning them in a ditch. The camera shook as the shooting took place, and turned away when the first of the men lobbed in a grenade.

‘Military site a friend of mine gave me access to,’ Marc said. ‘There’s been some rapid response, as you can see. But the scope of this thing is huge. It’s spreading like ripples in a pond, except that they’re getting bigger and faster. It’s hit beyond Charlotte in the east, Atlanta in the south, and there are even reports from Nashville.’

‘All in a day,’ Vic said.

‘Yeah. A day.’

‘But we’re fighting back, right? The government? The military?’

Marc looked at him, another of those long stares that suggested he’d forgotten that he was driving.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But what do they think they’re fighting? No one believes in zombies.’