Coldbrook(68)

‘What’s left of home?’ Lucy asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Our friends,’ Lucy said. ‘Mark, Sarah, Steve, Peter? What about them, Vic? Are they all dead? And our house? I locked the doors but do you think . . .?’

‘Home is wherever we are,’ Vic said, eager to snap his wife out of this.

Lucy looked at the bathroom door again. Water was running in there, and Olivia was humming a tune that Vic could not identify. Coldbrook is your home, Lucy had told him, sometimes angry, sometimes just acknowledging what they both knew.

‘But if Jonah wants you to do something, go somewhere?’

‘Then I’ll take you with me.’

‘And if it’s dangerous?’

Vic blinked, hating the vulnerability in his strong wife’s eyes.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I think it’ll be dangerous everywhere.’ His gaze turned to the bathroom door and he saw Olivia through the gap, singing to herself in the mirror and fluffing up her sleep-flattened hair. Bad hair day! he’d say to her sometimes. If only that was all they had to worry about now.

He thought of his daughter dead, and hooting that dreadful call.

‘Has it reached here?’ Lucy asked. Vic nodded, and she seemed to strengthen. She’d always been scared of possibilities – Olivia being hurt, Vic getting ill – but was more capable than him at handling certainties.

‘Mommy,’ Olivia said, leaving the bathroom and turning off the light behind her. ‘Are we going to die?’

‘We’re not going to die because Daddy’s friends are here to help us,’ Lucy said. ‘There are some poorly people out there who need helping, but once they’re all better we’ll be able to go back home. Okay?’

‘Will we catch what they have?’

‘No,’ Vic said.

‘Because we’re behind the fence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Olivia jumped on the bed, and Vic leaned over and tickled her, and Lucy bent forward and started tickling her daughter as well. The little girl squealed with delight and squirmed from the bed, picking up a drawing pad and flopping down on her own bed.

The phone by the bed rang. Vic snapped it up. ‘Developments,’ Marc said. ‘Communications room, now.’

‘This is now?’ Vic asked, staring in disbelief at the laptop screen.

‘Constantly updating,’ Marc said. ‘Margins of error, but . . .’ He waved a hand.

It doesn’t matter, Vic thought. Whatever margin of error you apply to this . . . it doesn’t matter.

He knew well enough that the contagion had reached Cincinnati, but the extent of spread elsewhere was shocking. The red smudge on the screen had turned into a widening, deepening stain on the map of the USA. The solid red mass covered much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, with tendrils stretching into neighbouring states three hundred miles or more from Coldbrook. But beyond this were those other spots of infection, satellite stains that were spreading as quickly as the original, flickering on the screen with the promise of fresh growth. From New Orleans in the south to Philadelphia and New York in the east, to Detroit in the north, and even as far afield as San Francisco and Seattle in the west, the infection now spanned the country.

‘Shit,’ Vic muttered. ‘Aircraft, you think?’

‘Yeah,’ Marc said. ‘Public and private aircraft, zombie stuck in the cargo hold. And don’t discount the speed of spread along roads. Drive for ten hours straight with your foot down, and you can get from Atlanta to Dallas. One car or truck doing that with one of those f*ckers trapped on board . . .’

‘So what the hell do we do now?’ Vic asked. A feeling of unreality descended, distancing him from events. If he thought about this too much, he’d go insane. It was not a conscious defence, but right then he welcomed whatever instinct was striving to protect him. He looked up at Marc, and at Gary where he sat with his feet propped against a desk across the room.

‘I did consider getting back to Coldbrook,’ Marc said. ‘The first disease vector came through there, which might help me examine the disease source. And if it meant me going through the breach to find out more . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Coldbrook’s locked down,’ Vic said.

‘You got out, you can get us back in,’ Gary said.

‘But still no contact from Jonah?’

‘No. But we can’t assume that he’s dead.’

Back to Coldbrook. Vic had done everything in his power to flee that place, and in doing so . . . He closed his eyes and shook his head, that sense of distance buffering him once more against the truth. It would have got out anyway, he was sure. Something like this couldn’t be confined.

‘But now . . .’ Marc said. ‘Now, I don’t know if it’s even worth trying. Just . . . don’t know.’

‘Not worth trying?’ Vic asked. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Gary strode across the room and leaned on his shoulder, tapping at the keyboard. ‘As we said, there have been developments.’

Vic looked away from Marc and back at the screen. He’s scared. It was the first time he’d really seen that in him.

There was a new screen open on the laptop. It displayed a world map. There were red dots outside the USA.