Coldbrook (Hammer)(114)

Undoing her tool belt, she took out a telescopic wooden pointer and started nudging at the bodies. The pointer sank in and she cringed in disgust – the disturbance seemed to release the smell. It rose around her and she tried breathing through her mouth, but then she could taste the greasy reality of death.

Gotta get this done as quickly as possible. She fixed a voltmeter to the end of the pointer and started testing the bodies and the equipment they had melted into for any signs of power. There were none.

Holly got to work.

She had to scrape cooked flesh away from the damaged control panel. Some of it crumbled away and that was fine, but some was still moist. It stank. She gagged in the confined space, determined not to vomit because that would only add to the reek. She tried not to identify what she was seeing, but sometimes the fingernails were obvious, and she had to crack a jawbone to prise teeth from around a thick cable.

She worked at the damage, and every now and then she heard Jonah calling her name. ‘Almost done,’ she said several times, and she lost track of time as she worked. The toolkit carried some spares, but in other areas she had to steal fittings from boards and equipment which she knew were non-essential. Six feet from here was a TV and audio distribution panel, and she didn’t think that she and Jonah would be watching reruns of Lost again any time soon.

The first time she heard the scraping she thought she’d dropped and trodden on one of her tools. Immersed as she was in the repair work, she did not check. The second time, she knew that she had not moved at all.

‘Hear something,’ Jonah shouted.

Holly looked down. The corpses were moving. The part grabbing for her was identifiable only by its watch, and even then it was barely recognisable as a hand.

She grabbed for her gun and dropped it. It bounced, flipped between the gangway’s safety rails, and she heard its impact down in the dark a few seconds later.

‘Jonah!’

‘. . . to check . . .’ she heard, his voice further away than ever.

‘Jonah!’

The thing shifted for her, rising up. As a hand grasped her belt and pulled her down, Holly tried to scream.





7


Jonah didn’t want to leave but the noises drew him away.

It wasn’t until Holly had returned through the breach that he had acknowledged his ownership of this place. Being here on his own had been bad enough, but now that Holly had seen what had become of Coldbrook he was suddenly more protective of the facility. It was a part of him that had been hurt.

Holly was working hard to repair the power, and simply waiting out in the corridor felt far too passive. She was safe. She would succeed.

And that noise . . .

As Jonah hurried along the corridor curving around the core he tried to analyse the sound. It was a distant whisper, yet he knew it would be loud close-up. Scratching and whipping, like twigs or branches scraping against a window.

At the foot of the narrow stairs he suddenly knew where the noise was coming from, and realised that he should have known from the beginning. He glanced back the way he’d come, listening for Holly. All was quiet. So he passed the staircase and continued along to Control, afraid that the Inquisitor would be waiting for him around every bend.

Even before he approached Control’s glass wall, he could see the frenetic movement within. Strange torchlight was flickering and fading as something moved across the large room.

He moved to the glass and looked in. Something ricocheted from the wall, leaving a wide, starred impact mark. An arrow! Jonah jerked back.

Sweet Jesus.

The conflict raged in silence behind the glass. A fury turned towards him and climbed across one of the workstations, knocking a broken computer screen to the floor, sprawling out of sight and then standing again. It came for him, striking the window and rebounding, then bashing at the glass with knotted fists. Bits of it broke away. It was very, very old, and this close he could see that its eyes were shrivelled and dry.

Several shadows stood or squatted just within the breach, firing bolts and arrows into the mass of zombies. Jonah checked the furniture that he and Holly had piled outside the doors. It seemed secure. But he was shaken, and as he backed away along the corridor everything inside him screamed at him to wait. Soon they would be through, and he wanted to be there for that moment. He wanted to see those people from another Earth. But he had a responsibility to Holly, and even more so to Coldbrook.

Furies fell, and the air in Control filled with the dust of ages.