Coldbrook (Hammer)(108)

‘Fine,’ Marc said. ‘Gary, got a rope or a ladder in this thing?’

‘Yeah.’

Vic swallowed hard. What the f*ck? But something had to be done. His legs ached from inaction, and his heart throbbed with the need to make amends. To Lucy and his daughter, for deeds unspoken; and to everyone else. I’d be dead if I’d stayed in Coldbrook, he thought, but ‘if’ was no defence.

‘Where is it?’ Vic asked.

Vic sat in the helicopter’s open doorway, gripping the door’s handle with both hands while Gary manoeuvred closer and lower. Beneath them the hordes were stirring, some of them now even reaching up, unlike before, as though to snatch the helicopter from the sky.

‘This is as low as I go,’ Gary said in his earpiece, and Vic took a look down. They were hovering above the aircraft’s wide wing, and either side of the wing he could see what awaited him if he slipped and fell. The zombies’ hands, clawed and ready to rip and tear. Their open mouths, showing expression only with the bloodied teeth they contained. Marc was strapped safely into the seat beside him, ready to lean from the doorway and give him covering fire with his rifle. Shoot me if I fall, he wanted to say, but Lucy still had her headpiece on, sitting behind him in the cabin and shielding Olivia from the roaring, smoke-laden wind.

‘Won’t be long,’ he said instead, and he and Marc locked stares. Marc nodded once. Maybe he already knew what his responsibilities were.

Vic kicked the coiled rope ladder from the door. It unfurled and landed on the wing, much of it still rolled up. He looked at the aircraft again, and at the faces watching from the window of the emergency door leading onto the wing. They looked as nervous as he felt.

He turned around onto his belly and eased himself out of the door. As his feet found the ladder Lucy’s words surprised him, soft as a breeze in this storm.

‘Come back to us.’

‘Put the coffee on,’ he said, but he could not look at his wife and child again. Not until he was back.

Vic started to climb down. When he was a kid he’d had a tree house in his grandparents’ garden. Something straight out of Huckleberry Finn, his grandfather had claimed, but Vic had always seen himself as Calvin and the tall childhood friend he hadn’t thought about in thirty years had been Hobbes. ‘If you could see me now,’ he said, and he wondered what had become of Hobbes and where he was. As kids, they had both negotiated the rope ladder up to the tree house with ease, and his grandfather had said that such a thing was like riding a bike. All about balance and confidence. But they hadn’t had a buffeting wind to contend with, nor a motor roaring so loud that the noise felt like a physical impact. And if they’d fallen there’d only have been cuts and bruises, and fallen leaves clinging to their clothes.

Hand over hand, ever cautious, Vic descended from rung to rung. He glanced down when he thought he was almost there, to find he was only halfway down.

‘Bloody cold out here,’ he said, and he heard Marc laugh in his ear. But no one else replied. This action was all down to Vic, and keeping his concentration tightly focused was paramount. There could be no distractions.

A gust of wind set him swaying. He clung on tight and closed his eyes, stomach lurching as he felt himself swinging through the air. He looked up again and saw Marc looking into the cabin, then back down at him.

‘Sorry!’ Gary said. ‘The fire’s whipping up a windstorm. Don’t want to hurry you, but—’

‘Yeah,’ Vic said. As he started down again Marc’s voice crackled through his earpiece.

‘Fuck, f*ck, f*ck. Vic, you got trouble.’

‘What?’

‘Down. Look down.’

Vic looked down. The drifting helicopter had dragged the rest of the ladder from the wing, and now it was unfurled all the way to the ground. And the things were already trying to climb up it.

The first one was the tall cop, his face bitten off, teeth bared because he had no lips.

‘Hold on!’ Gary said. ‘I’ll swing around and—’

‘No time,’ Vic said softly. ‘Can’t risk them catching me. They’re not worried about dying.’

‘Oh, Vic,’ Lucy said, but he did not reply, did not even want to give voice to his despair. He had seconds, and every one of them had to count.

He glanced up. Marc leaned out of the doorway, aiming the rifle down.

‘Vic, I can’t see past you.’

‘I’ve got it. Gary, hold that f*cker still!’ He turned sideways to the ladder and threaded his left arm and right leg through, bending his elbow and grabbing a rung above him, pulling his knee around the rope, and tugging the gun from his belt with his right hand. It slipped in his palm, and he cried out as it almost fell from his grasp.