Coldbrook (Hammer)(111)

There were figures moving behind her, through the breach. The darkness throbbed and shifted, a pulsing riot of shadow that was drawing closer.

‘Might be the guards,’ Holly said, but there was doubt in her voice.

‘Guards?’

Holly concentrated, peering through the breach, turning her head slightly left and right. She lifted the crossbow again, and it seemed such an unconscious gesture that Jonah wondered how much she had changed. When she’d gone through she had been a scientist, now . . . now she looked like someone out of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not the guards. Don’t know how time changes when . . .’ She grabbed Jonah’s arm and started for the door. ‘We have to get out of Control and lock it up, tight.’ She looked around the large room, and he knew what she was searching for.

‘It’ll come again,’ he said. ‘But . . . you hit it, and it went?’

‘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.