Coldbrook (Hammer)(113)

‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘I know where the problem is, and I might be able to fix it. But I’ll need a gun, just in case. And . . .’ She looked up, briefly blinded against the darkened room by the computer screen’s glow. For a second she thought there was something standing behind Jonah. But it was only his shadow.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Will you be all right?’

He didn’t answer right away. The silence made Holly uncomfortable, because it was Jonah betraying weakness and fear. However badly things had gone wrong, she wanted him to be her rock.

‘To be honest, I thought I’d come with you.’

And Holly was happy with that.

They headed for the narrow staircase that led down to the maintenance levels surrounding the core. Each of them carried a heavy torch, and Holly had stopped by an equipment room to collect a tool belt. She’d also accepted a gun from Jonah and tucked it into her waistband.

They’d passed the gym door from behind which came a steady, insistent scratching. Two in there, Jonah had whispered.

‘Here,’ Holly said when they reached their destination. ‘You been in here since?’

‘No.’

The door to the small plant room was closed. It housed two large electrical distribution boards and an access walkway into the secure housing around the core. If she’d read the diagnostic information correctly, the problem had occurred somewhere between the plant room and the core.

‘Right.’ Holly hefted the gun, feeling awkward. She hadn’t fired a gun in years. ‘Maybe I should take that.’ She nodded at the crossbow that Jonah had brought with him.

‘Confined space?’ he said, raising one eyebrow.

Holly opened the door while Jonah stood back, his gun and torch aimed. She prepared herself for a surge of activity – movement, shouting, gunshots. But after a few moments her old boss sighed quietly and nodded.

‘Don’t nod off while I’m in there,’ she said. ‘I know what you old guys are like.’ She turned away from his glare, smiling as she entered the small room. The tool belt was heavy around her waist, and she held the gun in her right hand, pointing the way.

She swept the torch’s beam around the room. It was as she remembered it – it seemed to have been left untouched by what had happened. She gave the distribution boards a cursory glance and saw no immediate problems. The space was narrow, and she had to turn sidelong to squeeze past the boards and into the narrow passageway beyond.

The walls here were bare concrete, lined with cables and wire ducts, old routes marked out by pocked holes. Her belt scraped one wall, and a shower of grit and dust fell softly to the metal gangway. She shone the torch down into darkness.

‘Okay in there?’ Jonah called. His voice was muffled, even though he was only about twelve feet away.

‘Yeah. Nearly there.’

She shone the torch along the gangway and moved on. When she reached the end it split and curved left and right around the outer extremes of the core-containment wall. A deep darkness dropped below to where the core’s base was cast into rock. It was to the left that she hoped the problem lay.

She spotted them from several feet away. At first she thought it was a pile of old clothing, perhaps left there by the maintenance crews. But then she saw that the dim shape was more than a heap of discarded clothes.

‘Anything?’ Jonah called, and she could barely hear him. The gap she had crossed swallowed his voice.

‘Won’t be long,’ she said, and, as her own voice echoed away above and below, shadows around the shape moved.

But it was only the shifting torchlight. Holly stepped forward and saw two people who’d been fried by the massive electrical current that had passed through them both. One – she thought it was a man – was holding a long metal pole. The other corpse was beyond identification, and it had its arms wrapped around its burned chest, face buried against its stomach. Clothes had burned. Flesh and hair had burned as well, and she wondered how the fire had not spread further.

One had been attacking, one defending. The final defence had been suicide.

Though the power was out, Holly still stayed a couple of steps away, examining the mess of scorched flesh and material and trying to see where one body ended and the other began. It was grotesque. She felt sick and unsettled, shining her torch across motionless bodies.

She stamped her foot and made some noise. No movement. The brain could be destroyed in more ways than one, but she still had to be careful.