Coldbrook(93)

‘I’m sure the bolt got it in the shoulder,’ Holly said. She shook her head, frowned. ‘Maybe it was a caster.’

‘Caster?’

‘Furies that don’t move, just observe. They watch through them.’

‘You know about them?’

‘Oh, yeah. Come on. Out of here, then we’ve got some catching-up to do.’

The breach was moving now, and through the hole between the two worlds Jonah could see limbs and shuffling bodies.

‘Power’s off all over?’ Holly asked.

‘And communications.’

‘You’re alone down here?’

Jonah didn’t answer that, and the image of the Inquisitor rose up again.

Holly grabbed Jonah’s arm and pulled him up the stepped ramp. They closed Control’s doors and set about piling the furniture against them again. They gathered more items from the storeroom close to the staircase – several cots to prop against the corridor’s opposite wall, filing cabinets, and more chairs.

‘This won’t hold for ever,’ Holly said.

They were coming through. In the weak bluish light of Control’s emergency lighting, they looked like strange plants with the power of movement – ragged limbs, wild hair, sunken skin like bark worn down by decades of sun and darkness, heat and frost. Their eyes were dark cavities in their dead faces. There seemed to be no purpose in their movement other than simply to keep going. Jonah could see no expressions on their faces, apart from those placed there by injury or deformity. How old these things were he could not tell, but he sensed an age to them that stripped away any shred of humanity that even a dead thing might possess. They were no longer meaningfully human, though in shape and build they resembled roughly what they might once have been. These were other.

‘My fault. I woke them.’ Holly held Jonah’s arm again, giving and receiving comfort. He could barely tell her how good it was to feel her warmth.

One of the zombies that had come through was different from the others. He wore clothes similar to Holly’s, and the weak light reflected from the fresh gaping wound in the side of his face. Jonah could see the man’s teeth. He could also see the slackness of his face, any expression fallen away in death.

‘Oh, God!’ Holly said, burying her face against Jonah’s chest.

Without speaking, he picked up Holly’s crossbow and guided her away from Control.

‘Secondary?’ she asked softly.

‘For now. I’ve locked some of them away. Shot a few.’ Jonah expected some reaction, but Holly didn’t even glance at him. ‘Vic got away.’

‘Away?’

‘He ran. I think some of the infected followed him.’

Holly paused, cautious, as she asked, ‘You don’t know what’s happening outside?’

‘A little. I know it got out. But since the power went down . . .’ Jonah shrugged.

‘It’s spread,’ she said. ‘Jonah, it’s spread a lot. I’ve seen it. Images from the casters. I walked through from our world to theirs, but they cast through. Send their consciousness through, somehow, and take control of furies, see through their eyes.’

‘You’ve seen this?’

Holly nodded.

They reached Secondary. Even though he knew otherwise, Jonah felt safer when they’d closed and locked the door. He retrieved more torches from the emergency store and placed them around the room.

‘Vic grabbed his family and went north,’ Jonah said.

‘Why?’

And he told Holly everything. About what he’d been forced to do down here, and about Vic, and the Inquisitor, though he had trouble explaining what he could not comprehend.

‘But what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘What’s through there?’

‘There’s nothing through there,’ she said. ‘Gaia . . .’ She barked a bitter laugh. ‘Great name Melinda came up with there. Gaia had its apocalypse forty years ago.’

‘Forty years . . .’ Jonah said, and the shock was profound. This has all happened before.

‘There are survivors,’ Holly said. ‘I emerged close to their Coldbrook and met Drake. He told me a little.’

‘But the thing that came through,’ Jonah said. ‘All those things in Control. Forty years old?’

‘They call them furies.’

‘Furies. Good name.’

‘But there’s hope!’ Holly said.

‘Hope?’ he blurted, feeling the attention of something unknowable focused on the back of his neck. He glanced around, but there was nothing to see. When he looked back Holly had her eyes closed.

‘There’s hope hidden in the deep basements of their Coldbrook,’ she said. ‘His name’s Mannan, and he’s immune to the furies’ bite.’

‘Immune,’ Jonah said. He breathed in the word and let it settle. In his mind’s eye he saw that Inquisitor monster watching him, waiting.





6


Jonah poured a drink while Holly fired up a laptop. As she accessed the CCTV log to see what had happened moments before the power outage, she recalled the Gaia survivors projecting images of her own world’s destruction onto fluid screens. Her own technology suddenly seemed inferior; the program froze for a few seconds, screen flickering. She felt disassociated from what she was doing, as if she had left a part of herself back through the breach, and she realised that no one knew what effect passing through might have.