Coldbrook(9)
He paused inside the door and looked along the hallway. It was twenty yards long, and for the final five yards one wall was made of solid glass, offering a panoramic view of Control’s curved, terraced layout and the breach floor below. The light flickering at that window was the dancing electric blue of the eradicator.
As Jonah’s heart skipped a beat, Coldbrook’s main alarm began to sound.
4
Holly felt as if she were being watched. It was probably the phone she hadn’t hung up again, with Jonah on the other end. And even though she knew he’d be on his way by now, still the feeling remained until she hit the alarm button. But by then everything had gone wrong.
The thing stood on their side of the breach, within the containment field and the influence of the eradicator, but still standing as well. Maybe it’s dead and just won’t fall down, Holly thought, but she could see movement in its limbs, and its lank hair swayed as it swung its downturned head a few degrees in either direction. It was naked, its exposed skin dark and cracked. Clumps of hair clung to its body and its genitals, though shrivelled, were obviously a man’s.
When it had first come through, Satpal – standing close to Holly now, eyes wide in wonder – had called it humanoid.
‘No,’ Melinda had said, ‘it’s human.’
But there was something so very wrong with that assessment.
As the intermittent wail of the alarm filled Control, Holly’s hand hovered over the manual eradicator controls which she’d already turned to full charge. Enough to kill a rhino five times over. One more time, she thought and she pressed the round red button. The breach flashed as the eradicator discharged. Sparking blue light wormed through the thing’s hair and illuminated the deep dry cracks in its skin, a jigsaw of wounds and fractures. It should be dead, if not from the eradicator then—
Because of those wounds.
‘Charge it again!’ Alex shouted, gun aimed.
‘That was full charge,’ Holly said, and Melinda turned to her, wide-eyed. Full? her look said. Holly nodded, then looked back at the intruder. The eradicator was designed to cease brain activity and negate electromagnetic function, halting hearts, freezing muscles, shifting a thing from living to dead in a matter of seconds.
Their intruder had taken three full charges, and still stood.
‘It takes one more step, open fire,’ Alex commanded the other three guards. Holly knew that they wore throat mics and inner-ear receivers, so their voices would easily carry over the harsh noise of the alarm.
Jonah and the others will come running, she thought, glancing back at the glass wall beside the main entrance door.
And Jonah was there, pressed flat against the glass like a kid at a sweetshop window. He looked past her and Melinda at the intruder, and in his eyes Holly could make out the sudden terror that they had done something dreadful. By pressing the alarm she had initiated a partial lockdown of Coldbrook, securing Control and the breach floor within it from the rest of the facility. Jonah could look, but he couldn’t touch.
‘It’s not human,’ she said. ‘It can’t be.’
‘Stay back!’ Melinda said, holding up her hands in a warding-off gesture. She was ten steps from the visitor. ‘Stay away!’ And as though taking her words as a signal, it started forward again. A dry rasping sound accompanied its movement. It shambled, feet dragging, head down, hands barely moving, as if at the end of a walk hundreds of miles long. The intruder had not seemed a threat until the eradicator failed to stop it, and even then Holly had frantically checked the settings and levels of the device she had designed and built. But pressing the alarm button had felt like an admission, and from then on Holly’s fear had been building. Charging, like the eradicator. Ready to burst.
Melinda did not move back and, as the man from the other world came within three feet of her, gunfire erupted.
Bullets thudded into the shape, its face still turned down but hands raised, reaching for Melinda as if she had always been his goal. Holly saw the bullets flick at his hair and blast bits of him across the breach floor, shattering him as he moved between this universe and another, and she thought, Have we just declared war?
But then he reached Melinda, and in a surreal gesture she held out her arms as if to prevent him from falling. He bore down, driving her to the floor beneath him. He started to scratch and bite. And when Melinda’s scream came it echoed Holly’s, their own alarm filling Control with a very human fear.
‘Oh, God!’ Holly said, a plea in her voice because she didn’t know what they had done. The bullets hit him and ripped him, but he’s still—
The shape, previously slow and lethargic, was now frenzied in its movements. It used both hands to bat away Melinda’s arms, which she had raised over her head to protect her face, and darted its head down at her like a bird pecking seed. Even behind the shouting and gunfire, Holly heard the unmistakable sound of teeth clacking together.
‘Help her,’ she said hopelessly, and the guards were doing their best. Alex and another had advanced and were kneeling, trying to adjust their angle of fire so that they didn’t strike Melinda. The other two were carrying a long table down the steps towards the breach floor.
Melinda screamed as the man bent his face into her chest and starting biting. He shook her like a dog, lank hair flailing, and Holly closed her eyes and looked away as she saw blood flying, spattering down across the floor from his teeth. Why don’t they just shoot?