Coldbrook (Hammer)(14)

‘Andy! What’s up?’

He skidded to a stop past Vic’s door and looked back. ‘Dunno. Alarm woke me so I’m off to my station.’

‘Yeah,’ Vic said, and Andy turned and hurried on. Off to my station. They all knew what to do should the alarm sound. It had been drummed into them enough.

Vic slipped back into his room and closed the door, searching through the mess of clothes on the floor for his satphone. He was one of several in the facility who kept them on their person at all times – him, Jonah, Holly, the guards’ captain Alex – and it was also a direct link to outside. His priority now was to find out what had gone wrong, and then decide what he should do about it. Gotta get to my station in Secondary, he thought. That was what procedure said – the alarm would initiate Control lockdown, and Secondary should be his aim. But that was not what his heart said, and never had been. He’d always promised himself that if things went badly wrong down here, his family would come first.

He dialled Holly but received an unavailable signal. What the f*ck . . .? He cancelled, and dialled Jonah. It was answered in three rings.

‘Vic . . . something came through.’ The old man sounded breathless and panicked, and Vic had to close his eyes for a moment, sick at the knowledge that this was not a false alarm. He’d always had his doubts and fears, but even then he hadn’t really believed that something would go wrong. Not really.

‘Jonah, what was it? Where are you? Where’s Holly? I can’t reach her.’

‘I’m going for Secondary. Control’s locked down.’ He panted, running as he spoke. ‘Something came through.’

‘What came through?’ Vic asked again, cursing the continuing alarm that stole some of his words.

‘Don’t know . . . a creature, but . . .’ Gasping, coughing.

‘Where’s Holly?’

‘Control.’ Vic stared at the narrow cot where he and Holly had made love so many times, felt her breath on his neck and her fists squeezing his shoulders as she came, and his sister’s voice echoed from his dream. Right, yeah. At work.

‘How did something get past the—?’

‘Vic, it attacked Melinda.’

‘What? How?’

‘Bit her. Bad. But then she . . . I thought she was dead, but she . . .’

‘Jonah?’

‘Need to control this until we can . . .’ He was panting harder now, each breath a gasp. ‘. . . can figure out . . .’

‘Is Holly safe?’

‘Don’t know. Meet me in Secondary.’

‘Okay.’ And before he could say anything else Jonah signed off. Vic stared at the satphone for a few seconds as if expecting it to buzz into life again.

He snapped up his palmtop computer, patched into the wireless network and then accessed the facility’s remote cameras. It took two attempts to enter the correct password, and for a panicked moment he feared that some security-conscious employee had changed it. But then the thumbnail images sprang up, and he scrolled across to Control.

Even before maximising the image, he could see how bad it was.

Control was in chaos. Someone was shooting, the gunfire somehow seeming even more violent without sound. Blood was splashed across the floor, pooled around a prone shape.

Vic gasped, looked for Holly, brought the palmtop closer to his face. But he couldn’t make anyone out.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Something came through and Vic couldn’t see what that something might be. Whatever it was, it had brought death.

Shaking, he dropped the palmtop face-down on the bed and dialled the first few numbers of his home landline. He paused, cancelled. It was four a.m. If he told Lucy that something was wrong, she might panic and let it slip to someone else. And he needed his family exactly where they were.

He paced his room, uncertain, clasping the phone, glancing again at the palmtop. Something came through, something attacked, and Holly was somewhere in there. His family would be asleep, Lucy lonely in the marital bed he had betrayed so much. His long-dead sister was right, he had told Holly that he loved her. But it was an illicit love, passion-driven, and nothing compared to what he felt for his family.

Vic was shaking.

As he blinked, he saw Lucy’s expression in his dream as Charlotte spewed out the sordid truth. The suspicion that existed in nightmare, and which perhaps he’d spied several times in the years since the affair had ended.

In the echo of Jonah’s gasping, panicked words, duty called. But Vic could only heed a far greater duty.